What Happened to You? with Dr. Bruce Perry

Today's episode features New York Times best-selling author, neuroscientist, and developmental psychiatrist, Dr. Bruce Perry.

 In this episode we discuss:

• why we need to start asking "What happened to you?" rather than "What's wrong with you?
• how relationships and connection can counterbalance the negative health impacts of trauma
• how our brains interpret stress and influence our abilities to cope

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Transcript

Speaker 0    00:00:00    I do think people struggle with the difference between explanation and excuse. When I'm trying to help people make that distinction, I have to say, listen, I'm not saying that what they did was right, but I don't think that we'll ever understand why they did it or how to change them. If we don't know where all this came from,  
Speaker 1    00:00:25    Please listen carefully.  
Speaker 3    00:00:30    Welcome to Critical Conversations. I'm Abbie Henson, your host and an assistant professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. This podcast is a space to learn from change makers and experts on racial, social, and criminal legal issues, and to inspire further dialogue with friends, family, and community in order to impact culture and ultimately achieve equity and justice for all. I hope you enjoy being part of these critical conversations. Now, let's get into it. Today's guest is New York Times bestselling author Dr. Bruce Perry. Dr. Perry is a neuroscientist and developmental psychiatrist who serves as the principal of the Neuro Sequential Network. In today's episode, we speak about his latest book, what Happened to You, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey. We explore the importance of context and history when it comes to understanding the self and others, as well as the importance of connection and the role of relationships in alleviating the harms of traumatic incidents.  
Speaker 3    00:01:36    I hope you enjoy this episode, and please, if you can, I would really appreciate if you would leave a review and also subscribe, share, tell everyone you know about it, and if anything comes up for you that you'd like further discussion on, please feel free to email cc office hours gmail.com and watch the breakdowns at Juwan and I do in our YouTube series Office Hours. The link can be found in the show notes. All right, let's get into it. You just co-authored this book, what happened to you with Oprah Winfrey, and one of the main framings is that you're saying, instead of approaching what's wrong with you, we ask what happened to you. And so I'm wondering if you can just kind of expand on what this framework is and what it entails.  
Speaker 0    00:02:24    I think the title more than anything, is a plea for people to remember that things just don't appear out of nowhere. Right? You know, human behavior just doesn't appear out of nowhere. The conflict in Northern Ireland just doesn't appear out of nowhere. You know, the, uh, the challenges of our current criminal justice system having overrepresentation of people of color, it just didn't happen out of nowhere. There's a history that leads to an understanding of that current set of issues e in each case. And so being somebody who both liked history, as I grew up and liked development, you know, as studied human development, I was very well aware that the functioning in the present of any person is related to their history. What, what happened to them as they were growing up, and also in many cases what didn't happen, you know, did they not get, what would've been healthy experiences?  
Speaker 0    00:03:25    Did they not get opportunities that other people got and so forth. So it's a reframe that captures really a big movement that's been going on over the last 20 or 30 years in our field where more appreciation about the power of those early experiences is coming to the forefront. You know, it's a long, it's been a long journey, but I think more and more people are appreciating, uh, number one that experiences shape people. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and I think just about anybody, you know, you could just sit at a park with anybody and start talking with them, and they would appreciate that it, the way their child behaves, the way they behave, the way that person's acting has something to do with what happened to them. But I think, oddly enough, the current mental health system and the current educational system and the current juvenile justice system don't spend a lot of time on that.  
Speaker 0    00:04:27    They, they kind of look at what is wrong with you? Why did you steal that? Why are you impulsive? Why are you inattentive? Why can't you learn this? If you fail and fail and fail again when the world has these expectations for you, we start to, uh, label you, you know, we label in the, when you're really early little, we label you as a naughty kid, and then we give you, as you get older, we label that as a mental health problem. And then as you get even older, the exact same things that got you called an naughty kid and someone with a D H D and chronic disorder gets you arrested and thrown in jail. And once you get into the criminal justice system, it's basically, it's tough to get out of it. You know, you, this, the inertia of failure, it just is so heavy on, on your trajectory.  
Speaker 3    00:05:17    I was thinking, you know, as you're talking, when we use that framework of what happened to you, I think so much of our, of the way that we think about these things is through a personal responsibility narrative, right? It was, it was either your issue or your mother's issue or your father's issue, but we have to situate each person within the community within the broader context. And a lot of the, the solutions, the quote unquote solutions that we have to addressing maybe what had happened to you doesn't take in the context. And so we can give someone as much c b T as we want, but if they're experiencing racism and employer discrimination and all of these compounding more social issues, then when you take that person and try to fix them individually, it doesn't have that big of an effect.  
Speaker 0    00:06:17    Yeah. And I, I, I think that that's so important. You know, you, you, you're pointing out that most of our systems are created to think of people in a vacuum almost, that they're, like you said, there's this sort of individual bubble of responsibility that you're supposed to be able to manage and, and navigate with a certain facility. We never take into consideration the fact that you, as a 15 year old person may have only had the developmental experiences and opportunities that a typical six-year-old has. And so your challenges with the world aren't really truly reflective of the potential gifts and experiences of a 15 year old. They're reflective of the potentials and gifts of a six-year-old. And so when you act like a six-year-old in a world that expects you to be 15, you're gonna, you're going to fail. You're gonna do poorly in school, you're gonna be bad at relationships, you're not gonna be responsible at the first job you get, you know?  
Speaker 0    00:07:18    And so all of this cascade of failure is not contextualized, and it's a major problem with the mental health field is that we continue to not really look very carefully at development, and we continue to create expectations in education, mental health, juvenile justice, that are based on chronological age, not on developmental capabilities. Now, it's interesting, the law is beginning to understand this a little bit, right? So we can't execute somebody if they have a lower iq, right? If they have develop, if they have some area of the way they process information that is clearly undeveloped or, or outside of the normal range in an extreme way, we are not applying the same standard to other parts of the brain. You know, we're only applying it to the cortex, you know, the top part of the brain that's involved in speech and language and complex thinking and so forth.  
Speaker 0    00:08:13    But the very same thing that has resulted in a low IQ can also impact the parts of the brain that are involved in normal social functioning and normal capacity to be empathic. So when a three-year-old goes over and grabs another kid's toys at the playground, we don't put them in prison, we don't charge them with theft. But if you're 15 years old and you go over and you grab somebody's stuff and run, we will charge you, particularly if it's a fourth, fifth, sixth time, and we've told you, we've told you don't do that, you know better you intended to do that. We really have these developmentally uninformed and developmentally ignorant policies and practices in our, in most of our big systems, and it leads to huge problems.  
Speaker 3    00:09:03    Yeah, that's a great point. And I never <laugh>, I never thought about it like that. I think that was one of the questions I was coming up for me as I was reading it, because so much of it is about contextualizing childhood trauma and a lot of talk about the juvenile justice system. And you touched briefly on the criminal legal system, the adult system, and I'm wondering if, you know, as you're saying, we view a three-year-old different than a 15 year old, than we do a 30 year old. At what point, right, at at what point in your mind, or in your opinion, do you feel like we stop giving grace or stop giving a better understanding of why someone might engage in those kinds of behaviors?  
Speaker 0    00:09:49    Yeah, you know, again, I, this is just kind of based on my observations and, and I, we, just so people know, I've actually done a lot of work in the juvenile justice system and, and a little bit in the adult criminal justice system. And my sense is that depending upon the school, there are certain schools that have a permeating ethic that kids should act their age and we need to hold them responsible. And we're not doing them any favors by letting them get away with immature behaviors. And so in those schools, that starts very early, you know, um, there are kids that will, by the time they're 8, 9, 10, basically be labeled by the educational system as if they're on their way to this inevitable trajectory, right. That they're actually contributing to. Right? I mean, their, their, their view about this is pushing these kids towards an inevitable outcome.  
Speaker 0    00:10:50    And this is kind of the school to prison pipeline that, that we see, you know, it's the huge numbers of kids, high percentage of of kids that are in the juvenile justice system get there because of something they did in school. You know, school wants to charge them for truancy or school wants to charge them for assault, when the irony is the vast majority of those assaults that happen in school are related to children that are trying to leave or that are not being compliant. And then the adult crosses space and puts hands on those kids, which if you were out in the neighborhood and an adult crossed space and put hands on a child, that would be assault by the adult, not the child. Hmm. But when the child resists and sort of gets combative, then they, and, and hits back or bites or spits, then the school charges the child with assault.  
Speaker 0    00:11:45    So that's where it begins. I think it starts in schools. And then I think, you know, there are, there are communities and there are programs that try to be flexible about giving kids an opportunity to do some restorative justice here. It's kind of sprinkled into the, the overarching punitive nature of the programs. But I think once you get into the system, it's really hard. I mean, you start to, if, if you leave the system and go into a new school, you're labeled, everybody's watching you with an eagle eye the first time you do anything that a normal kid does, you're the one that gets blamed. You're the one that gets excluded, you're the one that gets expelled. You know, just really the labeling process is something that, you know, it's, it's, it's a problem. And again, I don't, I don't really blame educators because we haven't done a good job arming them with the understanding, uh, about how to, uh, understand and, and interact with these kids in ways that are not going to be catastrophic. Yeah. You know, when you put one adult with the 15, 16, 18 25 kids, it's really hard to deal with that.  
Speaker 3    00:12:56    Yeah.  
Speaker 0    00:12:57    And so when you put people in situations like that, you are increasing the probability that they're going to default to these old kind of, I would say, inaccurate understandings of kids. You know, they categorize kids quickly. If you had literal, if you had that same adult with that child and said, I want you to educate them to, you know, you're doing eighth grade geography, there would be no problem whatsoever.  
Speaker 3    00:13:23    Hmm. Right.  
Speaker 0    00:13:24    They, they form a little relationship. They might get a little bit of guff back and forth, but pretty soon the teacher would be recognizing that this kid may, I, I'm supposed to be teaching eighth grade geography, he doesn't even know his cardinal directions. And so what the teachers do is they meet the child developmentally where they are, and then they, then they can have a, a positive educational experience  
Speaker 3    00:13:48    Thinking about how that actually is more of a systemic issue. It's the issue with how we teach.  
Speaker 0    00:13:54    It's completely systemic. That's exactly right. You're, you're absolutely right.  
Speaker 3    00:13:58    And you talk in the book about like how difficult it is to be a single parent, and so just being one parent with one child or even four, and then you think about a teacher being tasked with essentially parenting for those eight hours that the, the students are in school, 20 plus kids. I, I mean, we never think about it that  
Speaker 0    00:14:20    Way. Think about this. There's not somebody that's on the back of the parent every week saying, where's your chart? You know, where's your notes? Have you taken notes on the, have you met all the objectives? Uh, we're gonna do a test on all the developmental things you're supposed to be teaching. I mean, so teachers get it from the bottom and they get it from the top, and then they get it from the sides. The parents that say, why are you put treating Billy this way? Why isn't Billy getting special attention? Why did you put Billy in detention? Why? So being an educator in this, again, we have created systems that will inevitably misunderstand individuals. And, and the more you come from a background where you and your people have been marginalized, minimized, disrespected by the overarching sort of dominant view of that culture, the more likely you are to struggle. And this is why we have over overrepresentation of little black boys are expelled from pre-K at rates three times of other kids that are doing the same things. It's, these are broader systemic issues that are reflections, not typically of the individual, but of the context within which the individual is being educated and growing up and so forth.  
Speaker 3    00:15:43    Something that often gets conflated to, there's a social perception that if we, if we ask the question, well, what happened to you? And we use that framing, then it's excusing the behavior. So I think people conflate understanding and contextualizing with excusing and justifying. And there needs to be a, a fine distinction between the two because you can agree that someone needs to be held accountable while probably not in the <laugh> traumatizing systems that we have, but you can agree that someone needs to be held accountable and needs to be educated on what they did and how they did was, you know, harmful. But you can also ask that question in tandem with, let's understand why you engaged in this way and have that be a preventative tool. Right? Like that question is not only helpful in understanding the individual, but also preventing those same patterns in other people because we can recognize where problems stem from.  
Speaker 0    00:16:49    Exactly. It's interesting cuz I, there are times when I've been asked to, to be involved in death penalty sentencing phase of where you sort of look at somebody's developmental history and of course it takes about two seconds to go, well, what do you expect? I mean, y y you know, this person has been dehumanized treated poorly, you know, by 85% of the adults in his life and never had opportunities. And it's like not everybody who had that hard stuff happen ends up killing somebody. But it's not surprising that this person acted that way in a certain situation. And so the, I do think people struggle with the difference between explanation and excuse. I frequently, when I'm trying to help people make that distinction, I have to say, listen, I'm not excusing, you know, I'm not saying that what they did was right, but I don't think that we'll ever understand why they did it or how to change them if we don't know where all this came from. There's a quote by Abraham Lincoln that I think is really, captures this really beautifully. He was talking about, I think it was another legislator, and he said, I don't like that man. And then he said, I must get to know him. And, and it was just sort of his recognition that, you know, if I get to know him, maybe I'll understand him and I, and my feelings of dislike will shift. I mean it was, and I thought that was, that sort of captures what is a really, uh, a powerful point.  
Speaker 3    00:18:31    Yeah. You, you get this anecdote in the book about this guy waiting at the airport who is, there are all these delays and he's frustrated and he's kind of acting really cruel and little pompous. And in the book you call him a super jerk. And I was thinking like, in distinguishing again that like the distinction between the excuse and the understanding, like at what point when someone is acting, you know, objectively jerkish dickish, we should say, you know, at what point do we call them out or say instead, well, is he being a jerk or is he being triggered? I guess we can all have that inner dialogue of like, man, that guy's acting like a jerk, but at what point do we label someone explicitly in those ways as like a bad person or a mean person or whatever. Like when we do that, does it negate the same questions of empathy and understanding with what happened to you?  
Speaker 0    00:19:43    Yeah, you know, it's interesting cuz I, I, as you say that I'm thinking about people that I know that they really are jerks <laugh> and I know how they got there, but they're still jerks and, and I don't like being with them and they're not nice to people around them and I don't wanna work with them. And I can, again, I can sort of see that trajectory to how you got to be this way, but there's an impervious quality to them being open to seeing for themselves what happened to me. And so when you, when you are unwilling to be reflective about yourself, then you are one of the folks who's probably not gonna easily change. You know, I don't always feel like it's my, you know, place to tell people how to change or what to change, but what I've found is that there are people who recognize that in a certain situation they really were an ass and, and they show a little remorse for it, a little bit of regret. And, and it's those people who you can begin to do a little work with. But then there are some people who have kind of this narcissistic blindness and no matter what you say, what you do, it just doesn't sink in in a way that they're reflective at  
Speaker 3    00:21:06    All. Is that the outcome of something that the, their development?  
Speaker 0    00:21:12    Well, you know, probably, you know, probably a lot of those people who are organized that way at really important times, early, early when they were young, always were made to feel inadequate and never felt like they were strong enough, smart enough, big enough, fast enough or whatever, whatever the, whatever the family or the caregiver's values were, they never measured up in their own head. And so this narcissistic compensation ends up resulting in an inability to accurately look at yourself. And I mean, that's, I <laugh> not, not to get political about it, but I mean we, we've seen some recent examples of this in the, our political past in the United States here, <laugh>.  
Speaker 3    00:21:56    Okay. So essentially the what happened to you framework is a framework is kind of like a theoretical framework that we should apply in understanding people better. But in terms of the, uh, desire or outcome of change, it's only that question is only the first step. And then the other person has to meet that question with adopting what happened to me. Right? Like the inquisitiveness of that question, they, the question that you pose is a door that they then have to walk through  
Speaker 0    00:22:29    To. So to some degree, and I think people do that, you know, people, people are, are, I think people are naturally curious about other people. You know, I think everybody's like a junior psychologist, you know, you're trying to figure out why do my partner do that? Or why am my kids acting this way? Or why do my students do this? You know, you're, you're always trying to figure out motivations and we use, you know, what we call theory of mind, which basically is we see the whole world and interpret it through the lens of our own experience. And so you try to, you know, when somebody is, is mean to you or when somebody's kind of like, you know, in a conversation, they're just kind of non-reactive and not giving you a lot of feedback in your brain, your brain sort of both consciously and unconscious.  
Speaker 0    00:23:16    He goes, you know what, when I act like that I'm bored, I'm angry, I'm this, I don't, you know, I'm not really, don't wanna really be there. So you start to think, oh, they don't wanna be with me. Oh, I'm boring them. Oh, they don't like me. And of course we play these little weird little games and it can be, you know, it can be a problem that we create something that's really not true about an interaction. And so when it comes to that process of, of looking at what happened to you, a big part of it is people who recognize that your past has shaped you are gonna look back and go, you know, I grew up in North Dakota, Bismarck, North Dakota, and everybody was white and there were a few Lakota and there were a few hiza and there was one, one black guy from the naval you or from the Air Force base that I wrestled and I met him and I met another kid from the North Dakota School of the Deaf who was black.  
Speaker 0    00:24:18    But I, so my whole, just by going back in my history, I need to be able to say to myself, you know what, I'm sure I've got a lot of implicit bias because my whole worldview, my whole catalog of experiences with safe and familiar people have attributes of Midwestern people who are white, who mostly, you know, are middle class or upper middle class. And, and all of these other people that I'm running into out in the world who speak with different languages and have different religions, have different skin color. The default response of my brain is gonna be, oh, you're different. And so I'm gonna be filled when I go to a Chinese restaurant, I'm gonna be filled with biases. And when I go and I spend time at University of Chicago in a clinic that's 85% black, I'm gonna have little biases and, and I need to watch for those.  
Speaker 0    00:25:11    And that's what I think can lead to change is, is if you are willing to look at your own past and think about, I wonder how that's influenced the way I, I think about things, you know, and again, in in the juvenile justice area, you, lots of people listen to this podcast. You're gonna run into people, all kinds of people who are gonna say, oh, I grew up and I had all those bad things happen to me and look at me, I'm a parole officer now I did just fine. They need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and if I did it, they can do it. And the reason they didn't do it is maybe they didn't have grit or they didn't have this or, and so it becomes sort of this intentional moral permeated choice. And it's hard to get people off of that because the very same people that are locking up other people came from the same neighborhoods, the same backgrounds.  
Speaker 0    00:26:05    And so, you know, we have a lot of work to do in our field, right? Not just this field, but mental health education and to work through some of that stuff. And so really the, the reason the, the intention of the book was to make people think about these things and make pe make people think about, huh, you know, you know, maybe this person's managing all of their anxiety about their whatever by drinking, you know, maybe, maybe they're using, they like to go back again and again and again to heroin because it helps 'em dissociate and escape whatever pain they're experiencing in their life. And, and, and they smoke pot and don't they know that that's gonna make them a motivational and they're, they're not gonna be able to, you know, pull themselves up by the bootstraps. If, you know, understanding a little bit about how the brain works, a little bit about regulation, a little bit about reward, you can start to be a little bit more compassionate when you, you interact with people.  
Speaker 0    00:27:02    Cuz I think of the juvenile justice field is, you know, 85% of the crimes in the country are either directly or tangentially related to substance use independence and where's that from? And well, we know that if you have a life where there's a lot of chaos, unpredictability, threat, you're gonna be tuned up and dysregulated. And the first time you drink alcohol, you're gonna go, oh wow, I'm not dysregulated. I feel a little bit calmer. And the first time I smoke some pot, I'm like, wow, I haven't felt like this. This feels great. And so if these are the only ways you can get regulation and pleasure because you live in this hopeless, you know, you know, environment where there's poverty and unemployment and there's, you know, I dropped outta school and you, you keep thinking about the way forward and you don't see anything, you go get high and then, and then you get in that world and then you're like, oh, you know what? I can actually make 50 bucks if I just dropped this. I don't know, I dunno what is in here, but I'm just taking this envelope over to this here. That's all I have to do. They're gonna gimme 50 bucks for that. And pretty soon you're involved in all kinds of stuff that you weren't a bad, you're not a bad person, but you get caught and you end up in the system and boom.  
Speaker 3    00:28:25    Yeah. Yeah. I, so it's been really interesting. I've been doing a research study, I'm a qualitative researcher and I've been doing a research study interviewing police officers and it's been very fascinating because one of the conversations I'll have with them is about the criminalization of substance use. And it was interesting reading your book in the section on cutting, because what I'll ask them is I'll, I'll kind of try and ask questions to see if they're able to recognize substance abuse as a form of either or a attempting to relieve some kind of stress or dysregulation. And I start asking questions about why we, we criminalize drugs and drug use. And we start moving into these questions about, well, if we're thinking about it as kind of self-harm or a ways to alleviate harm, then should we criminalize cutting? And I'll ask that question though. And they're always like, well no, because that's a mental health issue.  
Speaker 3    00:29:30    And they have just such a distinct line that they've been socialized into seeing because of the war on drugs and because of our social perceptions of use that it's really hard for them to see the mirroring of those behaviors. And so in your section on substance use, so what's the difference between someone who is able to maintain healthy relationships and be productive while maybe taking heroin or methamphetamine? What is the difference there and why would we view that as so problematic as opposed to someone who say takes Lexapro or Prozac every single day to regulate those negative emotions as well? And just thinking about kind of our social perceptions and these dualisms that we hold simply because we've been taught one thing is bad and one thing is good.  
Speaker 0    00:30:25    Absolutely. And I, you know, you, you hit on it really early, early that th these are the context within which the use of a substance is either socially acceptable or not, or even criminalized. It's so fascinating that people have a hard time recognizing kind of these human foibles cuz it really is a human foible that led to this. And I shouldn't even use the word foible cuz that doesn't capture the toxicity of, of that perspective. But it really is just as you pointed out, it's nothing different than people that eat too much to regulate or people that watch pornography to get reward and regulation. There are other things that are more kind of acceptable that are just as destructive, but I think the criminalization of the use of substances is to spend catastrophic for some communities. I think it's kind of interesting now that there's a movement in mental health to take hallucinogens and kind of reintroduce them into the acceptable drug category <laugh>, which is just ridiculous cuz it's all, they're all, they're basically all having broadly the same effect. You know, they're, they're external substances that are used to influence neural networks in a way that we're going to seek some therapeutic impact and there will be some non-therapeutic effects. It's amazing. So many people that struggle with substances and end up in the criminal justice system, were using medic alcohol and cocaine and marijuana and opioids to basically regulate themselves. And you know, like you said, we we're not throwing people in jail because they're using Lexapro,  
Speaker 3    00:32:16    Right? You say this quote, uh, in the book, many interventions used to deal with substance abuse are punitive and increased distress. The pull to use gets stronger disconnection, marginalization, demonizing and punishing only make the problems of substance abuse worse <laugh>. And so it's like, okay, we are doing the exact thing that is problematic and then we wonder, we wonder why we have like a 70% re-arrest rate in the country because we're not addressing people's issues because we're not asking what happened to you. We're just criminalizing without contextualizing and it leads to all of these problems. And, and so I'm thinking you do a really great job in the book of kind of demonstrating these more scientific diagrams and thinking about the brain with this more kind of casual and informal conversation that you're having with Oprah. I'm wondering if you can kind of put on the science hat and talk about at what point does regulation become problematic? Like, well, I guess the first question is, at what point does too much stress become problematic? Because we know that a little bit of stress is important for building, uh, strength and ability, but at what point does it kind of cross that tipping point and then on the flip side, to regulate that stress, at what point does it become problematic?  
Speaker 0    00:33:48    Yeah, well, you're kind of hitting at the core of a lot of really important work as you well know. So we have these systems that are really in all parts of our body that, that work together to keep us alive and to help us thrive. And, and these systems are very responsive to whatever challenge they get. So the systems that we have that are cardio respiratory will be very responsive to lack of oxygen, increased need for glucose and so forth. Like if you run up and down the stairs, uh, or if you have a relational interaction with a group of people where you're getting the, the sense that you're not one of them and that you don't quite fit and they're giving you looks that don't feel warm and regulating, they feel sort of hostile and excluding you, stress response systems will activate. And this is largely the reason that's such a tightly yoked part of our biology is that in the natural world, the major predators of human beings has always been other human beings.  
Speaker 0    00:34:54    So our brain is literally very, very sensitive to the social milieu, which means that if you are in the presence of people who are giving you signals that you are one of us, you belong, you feel safe. And in those moments you feel pleasure, right? It's great when you just think about how great it feels to have a nice lunch with people that you know and kind of go laugh with friends and you just feel better. So in contrast, you know, your brain is exquisitely sensitive to these other relational cues. So one of the major modulators of your, of how you manage stress, any stressful situation is that if you do it with someone, you can handle more stress. Like literally, if you go running with somebody else, you can run further and run faster and you feel less distressed. Same thing happens with hiking, climbing it ha you know, when, when people look at these things, when you do things together, you actually can handle more stress and not feel distress.  
Speaker 0    00:35:55    And the the irony is you do the same amount of work, but you subjectively and objectively are distressed if you do it by yourself, in other words, it will be, it won't be as good for your body if you do the exact same thing, run the same distance, climb the same height, do all that kind of stuff. If you're by yourself, what we're seeing and what we've been studying for a long time is what are the, what, how do you titrate and balance all of these forms of stress that are present in somebody's life? And let's take kind of healthy variations of stress. So when you're a little kid or an adult and you're making your way through everyday life, you have everyday challenges, right? Traffic, you gotta go get groceries, you, you gotta give a presentation and, and these things will be little challenges and you generally manage those and you ma and over the course of a day you kind of have a, you wake up with a certain reserve and you kind of eat down that reserve by the end of the day.  
Speaker 0    00:36:58    And so this is why when you get home at the end of the day you're like, oh my god, you know, you don't wanna, I don't want to go out and oh my God, I gotta go do homework. You know what? So it's sort of like, it's harder, the things that you have to do at the end of the day feel harder than they would've felt if you had to do at the beginning of the day. But that's just, you know, everybody has that experience. Now what happens is if you have to do that same amount of stuff, but you are no longer getting relational regulation during the day, in other words, you're living in a pandemic, the exact same amount of work feels heavier and it's harder. And it ultimately gets to be more overwhelming and distressing even though the workloads really not that different.  
Speaker 0    00:37:41    And again, this goes back to your original observations that are so important. Human beings function not in a vacuum. We live in a context, in a relational context. And that relational context is dramatically influenced by the systemic context. The, these are some of the really important things. Thinking about the future of our fields. We cannot create juvenile justice policy or or criminal justice policy in a vacuum. We have to think about housing, we have to think about employment, we have to think about education, we have to think about early childhood. And if we can create some synchrony somehow in making sensible conceptually integrated practice and policy changes, we will have a quantum leap in the health, creativity and productivity in our culture. But right now we're so siloed that we literally still have, have a substance abuse and a mental health division. We literally have people who are trained at the highest level who will say, oh, we can't treat your depression until you deal with your drinking problem.  
Speaker 0    00:38:48    And the drinking people will say, oh, we can't handle your drinking problem until you deal with your mental health problem. And everybody's looking for some reason to wash hands of these troubling people because they're so complex that they, you know, we even label them dual diagnosis. It's bullshit. They don't have dual diagnosis, you have dual thinking <laugh>, they are the one person that, the good thing is that people are talking about this, right? I think one of the dilemmas of our, of our, the future of our problem solving process in our complex societies is connected to the fact that human beings are neurobiologically organized for much smaller groups and a much smaller set of less complicated problems. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So as our living groups get bigger and bigger and bigger, a lot of our solutions are more reactive and reactive and reactive. And they're very, you know, sometimes you look at stuff and rules and regulations, you go, who invented this? Yeah. I mean, what, what the, where did this come from? And I, I think part of what we have to get comfortable doing, and I know this feels a little almost creepy, is that we need to recognize that when you have complex societies with tremendous diversity in an array of problems, we have to externalize the problem solving process. Hmm. Not necessarily to one person or to a group of people. Cuz groups of people actually are dumber than individual people.  
Speaker 3    00:40:22    <laugh> more resilient, but less both dumber  
Speaker 0    00:40:25    <laugh>. Right? No, it's true. I mean, human groups, when they get together as a group, and you've been part of these groups, I'm sure when you get together, and here's the problem, and everybody listens to, we wanna be inclusive and we wanna be respectful. And I get this opinion, the product that comes out of that is nowhere near as smart as what one individual could have come up with. It may not reflect e everybody's perspective, but usually they're very overly simplistic solutions. And, and, and the interesting thing is, when you look at this, when you look at group iq, group IQ goes up when there's more women and when there are people who are much more comfortable with open communication, in other words, when you feel comfortable sharing the cognitions and feelings of other people, you create a more complex, more functional, creative whole. But if you are a academic white male and part of that process means giving up power mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you are not going to ha you will end up not being able to contribute in a positive way. You'll in fact inhibit the product of that group. So part of what I think we're gonna have to do is, and, and it's a little scary, but I think artificial intelligence models are gonna be better predictors for how to solve problems. We, we need to externalize our brain. Um, yeah, we need input from a lot of different people, but then we need something greater than any of us to work on it.  
Speaker 3    00:42:01    Yeah. You know, as you were thinking or as you were talking about kind of our country's context, and then I was thinking about how we label certain neighborhoods as high crime or dangerous or problematic. I was thinking that we could take, and this is why understanding history is so important and why teaching history of all kinds of schools is so important. Because if we can understand that we're living in a problematic society, right? There is a disproportionate amount of people dying from different issues and, uh, preventative issues. And so taking the same context of like looking at America and being like, what happened to you? Right? Understanding the context of how our society functions and looking at a community and looking at that community within this, what happened to you framework, what what led to the conditions of poverty and oppression? And then we get into the idea of redlining and all, all of these things, white flight and all of these things that allow us to better understand how we're living in certain conditions. And so I was just thinking of that we can really take this framework not only to that individual level, but to the family, to the community, and to our country as a whole.  
Speaker 0    00:43:18    Yeah. I I think you're absolutely right. And I think that there have been some really wonderful historical thinkers who have kind of done that. They've looked at, for example, how did Chicago end up with this vibrant middle class black community? And then three generations later there's tremendous poverty and, you know, the need to build the projects and how that good intention, you know, led to the even further fragmentation of the family. So there's people that have, that are thinking about and writing about these things. I I think unfortunately though we are not teaching many of our kids about these things and I still, I still love history. And I, I think once historians begin to learn a little bit about the biology of the brain, there are gonna be like neuro historians who, who really begin to capture some of these concepts in really interesting ways.  
Speaker 0    00:44:15    I've done a little bit, uh, you know, a long time ago I did some work with a gentleman named Richard Heley, who was a Russian, uh, historian of Russia. And he, his specialty was that there's a period they called the Dark Ages in Russia. And I had done some writing about how when you're exposed to threat, it literally shuts down your cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for creativity and, you know, future-oriented cognition and reflection on the past. And so you can live and you can function, but if you're living in terror, you, you basically are kind of going from moment to moment to moment. You're not, it, it's not as easy to be as creative and so forth. So when he read my work, he said, oh, I think I understand why this dark ages period happened in Russia. And it was a period when there was very little written literature written, very, very little creative arts and so forth. And it was when there was tremendous oppression and, uh, just brutal, brutal, brutal, almost random violence that was used to control, uh, what had been kind of a surf uprising. So literally everybody was terrorized. And so if the populace was terrorized, the probability of sort of emerging creative arts was just gonna plummet. But I think that that kind of, uh, incorporating awareness about stress, distress, trauma, neglect, I into, uh, really careful narrative about history will, will do exactly what you're talking about is people will begin to understand these things a lot better.  
Speaker 3    00:45:54    Hmm. That's really interesting about the lack of creativity with heightened terror and trauma. Cause I was just thinking, you know, if we think about the American context and marginalized and oppressed black communities who, you know, were terrorized by the people that enslaved them who were terrorized by the police and sicked with dogs and all this, but yet the deep amazing creativity that stemmed from these communities in terms of thinking about jazz and soul and r and b and hip hop and all this music and fashion  
Speaker 0    00:46:28    And, and all of these things though, they, they emerged once one or two or three of those individuals from these communities got to a point of safety instability. Hmm. You know, the writing, the great writing, the incredible intellectual writing of Frederick Douglass did not come out of him when, when he was li you know, as a slave in Alabama, it was when he was a safe free man. No, he never was a slave in Alabama. But that, you know, that that's where it came from. So there had, you have to get to a place of safety or at least partial safety. And that safety might just be that with your community, with your people, you've got enough people around you who make you feel safe and loved. And we will together create music and we will together do these things. And that's where the emergence of this came from.  
Speaker 0    00:47:26    Because in the act in the midst of active oppression and brutality and violence, the number of people who could express their creativity was squashed as elements of freedom and safety and, and family-based predictability and church-based safety. All those things help create an environment where that in, where that tremendous resilience could, could survive. I mean there, it's, it's the seeds were there, but the fruits of the, of those experiences I think are emerging even now. I mean, I I think that some of the, the amazing, uh, arts and creativity that are emerging from people who have been oppressed is continuing. But again, it, it, it really does help. Safety is the key to all creativity ultimately.  
Speaker 3    00:48:19    Right. I wonder if it's the key to creativity or the key to expression.  
Speaker 0    00:48:26    Good point. Yeah. Well, and, and, and the, the other part, and you, you sort of, you mentioned this earlier, but there's this, there's a form that post-traumatic creativity of a people and a person is something that is going to be richer, deeper, more powerful than the creativity that emerges from a person who's had no hardship in their life. And I hate, you know, that's n not to suggest that we should go cause hardship to people, but pain, I don't think any of the great works of art or literature didn't involve some kind of pain for the creator.  
Speaker 3    00:49:11    Yeah. I, as I said, I teach post-traumatic growth in my classes and I make sure to, you know, kind of put that caveat that this isn't to romanticize or be a proponent of inducing trauma, but that growth can occur even in tandem with disorder and stress. To kind of end on a high note, <laugh>, so you talk, you talk about how to heal, right? In the end there's kind of this notion of, all right, how do we really move forward? And you are very big, and as you kind of noted throughout this interview, the importance of connection, right? And you, you, you highlight how we're at a time, especially now with social media and more remote work and all these things, you, you call it a, we're at a time of relational poverty. And so you really call for that connection and the positive human connection that's nurturing.  
Speaker 3    00:50:09    And it's, I was just listening on Monday, I'm releasing an episode that I did with, um, Ari Hoyle who was the warden of the Halden prison in Norway. And they saw dramatic changes in their population once they started changing the role of the prison guard from solely security to essentially being a case manager, like a very nurturing case manager, essentially a social worker. And they saw dramatic increases and a huge dip in, um, recidivism rates. And so I was thinking about not only that in the context of the criminal legal system, but just in general like this need to cultivate connection and, um, how you, you call it, I don't think you use this this word, you say counterbalance, like this antidote to adversity.  
Speaker 0    00:51:01    Well, we kind of think of it that way, that, that we think adversity is inevitable. Um, I don't think nobody makes through life without loss or pain or disappointment, and most people have some kind of traumatic experience, but almost everybody has elements of unpredictability and distress and it just, it's the human condition. But counterbalancing that is that it's also the human condition to be part of a family and a community and a culture. And that used to be much more tightly woven than it is currently. And I think that as we, as we learn more about the power of relational connectedness, I think that we'll be better at recognizing that well-intended policies like removing kids from their parents, uh, in the child welfare system really is destructive in the long run. That, that we really have to have other solutions. We have to really focus on KinCare and moving a kid out of their school and out of their neighborhood and away from their scout troop and their sports teams.  
Speaker 0    00:52:05    That's actually harmful for the child that's not helping the child. The same thing with prisons. I mean, if we want people to get better, we need to figure out how to create a sense of connection and community, particularly during the transition out of prison, in back into whatever their community is. And we're terrible at that. Not only that, are we terrible at that? We make additional rules. We don't let you rent an apartment, we don't let you get a job. We don't let you do anything where you form relationships. So we just have to think differently about what we do. And I think, I mean, the good thing is, you know, human beings are incredibly adaptive. And usually once we know better, you know, like Maya Angelou said, we do better. However, for all of you youngsters out there, including you <laugh>, it takes about a long time.  
Speaker 0    00:52:57    You know, e even after we've proven with evidence something, it takes our systems sometimes 10, 20 years to incorporate these learnings into the way the system works because systems resist change and they like to maintain the status quo. And the people that are running those systems also don't want to give up power. Power never likes to give up power. And so part of what we're fighting are systems that have their heritage in sort of western European surf slave models where there's truly this belief that people at the top are the monarchs and the people at the bottom are property. We still celebrate that in England. I mean, think about it, prince Harry's bestselling book. Like why? I mean, it's fucking crazy. We literally believe that that person is elevated above other people. All of our systems have some carry forward of that. And until we sort of understand and modify some of these things, I think we're going to, we'll be tinkering, you know, our problem solving process will be tinkering.  
Speaker 3    00:54:10    So we just need to be socialists.  
Speaker 0    00:54:12    Well, I, we need to, we need to be relu. We need to, uh, yeah, I don't wanna say anarchists, <laugh>, but honestly, if we want fast change, you, we need to do revolutionary things. We need to blow up systems and not, uh, not try to tweak them and change the letterhead and change the administrative things and add a new assessment and all the bullshit we do, you know, we convene all these people for hours and hours and hours and hours and the recommendation is, oh, let's use a new measure. It's, it's nuts, but it is an appeasement technique used by people in power. Anyway, we could have a whole different conversation  
Speaker 3    00:54:46    <laugh>. Yeah. Maybe we'll answer <laugh>. Well, I just, I'm so appreciative. This is such a fun conversation for me. I feel like I have so many more things to say, but I wanna be mindful of your time. But yeah, thank you again so much.  
Speaker 0    00:55:03    My pleasure. Keep up the good work and uh, when you fi I would love to see when you finish that project to see some of that stuff cuz it's, yeah, it's part of what we're trying to understand all the time is how do you get people who sort of have a fixed mindset about something to shift and think differently. It's kinda tough. Yeah.  
Speaker 3    00:55:21    Well I think you're doing it in this book and it's how I do it. It's just by asking questions.  
Speaker 0    00:55:27    There you go.  
Speaker 3    00:55:31    Thank you so much for joining me in my critical conversation with Dr. Bruce Perry. There were so many golden nuggets in this episode in particular. I thought it was so interesting to hear that we endure stress better with others and we become more resilient in those moments. I also really appreciate the critique of our educational system, especially as an educator myself. I'm really curious your thoughts. So again, please email cc office hours gmail.com with any feedback and be sure to check out John and my breakdown on YouTube. Subscribe, share. Please leave a review, tell everyone you know, and I'll catch you next time.