What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

by Bruce D. Perry

When you find the reading too challenging, stop. Put the book down for an hour or a week. It will still be there when you feel able to return to it. And when you are ready to continue exploring why “what happened to you” shapes how you think, feel, and act, welcome. You just may discover a path forward.

Bottom line: Our brain is organized to act and feel before we think.

When you’ve been groomed to be compliant, confrontation in any form is uncomfortable because you were never taught that you have the right to say no; in fact, you were taught that you can’t say no.

For years, I would say yes to things I knew I really did not want to do, or avoid difficult conversations because I could not live with the discomfort of speaking up for myself.

here’s what’s interesting about drug use: For people who are pretty well-regulated, whose basic needs have been met, who have other healthy forms of reward, taking a drug will have some impact, but the pull to come back and use again and again is not as powerful.

This is why stress is not something to be afraid of or avoided. It is the controllability, pattern, and intensity of stress that can cause problems.

On occasion we will be challenged, surprised, or threatened and will move to the “Alarm” state. When this happens, we start to think in more emotional ways as lower systems in the brain begin to dominate our functioning. Our conversations regress into arguments; the logic of our arguments erodes into emotional or personalized attacks. We act less mature; we often say or do things that we regret.

Default Mode Network (DMN) is a term for a widely distributed network, mostly in the cortex, that is active when an individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future.