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In the rural South, this is how black children were raised.
For the next forty years, that pattern of conditioned compliance—the result of deeply rooted trauma—would define every relationship, interaction, and decision in my life.
Great description
understanding how the brain reacts to stress or early trauma helps clarify how what has happened to us in the past shapes who we are, how we behave, and why we do the things we do.
Despite the myriad circumstances into which we’re born, we come into the world with an innate sense of wholeness. We don’t begin our lives by asking: Am I enough? Am I worthy? Am I deserving or lovable?
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.
Powerful
I’ve found that a “brain-aware” perspective helps me when I’m trying to understand people.
Your brainstem can’t say, ‘Hey, don’t get so stirred up, Korea was thirty years ago. That sound was simply a motorcycle backfiring.’”
All experience is processed from the bottom up, meaning, to get to the top, “smart” part of our brain, we have to go through the lower, not-so-smart part. This sequential processing means that the most primitive, reactive part of our brain is the first part to interpret and act on the information coming in from our senses. Bottom line: Our brain is organized to act and feel before we think.
Our life experiences shape the way key systems in our brain organize and function. So each of us sees and understands the world in a unique way.
Moment by moment in early life, our developing brain sorts and stores our personal experiences, making our personal “codebook” that helps us interpret the world.
People feel like they can curse in front of young children. They believe they can be violent in front of young children.
The younger you are, the more you depend upon your caregivers—parents and other adults—to help you interpret the world.
Oprah: Yes, I believe every environment has a tone. If you were to walk into any home as a stranger, not speaking the language, you could absolutely feel whether this is a place where people are loved. Just as you can sense when something’s off. You may not know what it is, but something feels off.
If a child experiences abuse, their brain may make an association between the features of the abuser or the circumstances of the abuse—hair color, tone of voice, the music playing in the background—and a sense of fear.
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.
The sense of self informs every relationship or decision we make as we move through life. And when children don’t feel respected by the decisions of their parents, their beliefs about how they are valued are crushed.
When a new relationship enters the picture, two things happen. First, the child—and this is true even of babies—begins asking internally, “Who is this person, and what is this?”
A child exposed to unpredictable or extreme stress will become what we call dysregulated.
For instance, if a child sees repeated verbal or emotional or physical abuse of their parent, or experiences abuse directly from a parent’s partner, their brain makes connections between all the attributes of the abuser and threat.
After the visit ended, I went to see the teacher. He was in his classroom preparing for the next day. “This may seem a bit strange,” I said, “but what kind of deodorant do you use?” “Old Spice. Why?”
Later that afternoon, I asked Sam to sit down with me, and I explained what I thought was making him so uncomfortable and angry with the teacher.
Be honest and use this as a teaching moment.
My associations elicited positive feelings; his elicited distress and fear. As we make our way through the world, countless sounds, smells, and images can tap into memories we created earlier in life.
Our brain catalogs vast amounts of input from our family, community, and culture, along with what is presented to us in the media. As it makes sense of what it’s stored, it begins to form a worldview. If we later meet someone with characteristics unlike what we’ve cataloged, our default response is to be wary, defensive. In turn, if our brains are filled with associations based upon media-driven biases about ideal body type, or racial or cultural stereotypes, for example, we will exhibit implicit biases (and maybe overt bias).
Rhythm is essential to a healthy body and a healthy mind. Every person in the world can probably think of something rhythmic that makes them feel better:
When our baby is upset, it can make us upset.
The common element is rhythm. Rhythm is regulating.
Regulation is also about being in balance.
Dr. Perry: Yes. If I get hungry, I get up and make myself a sandwich—I self-regulate. But as you said, the infant has to rely on adults to help her with this. Caregiving adults provide external regulation. Over time, these responsive adults help the child’s brain begin to build self-regulating capabilities. And as we’ve mentioned, one of the most powerful tools we use to help regulate a distressed infant is rhythm.
This makes me think about when Cameron was younger, and the invoke thing was to let them cry it out and it still makes me feel bad that that’s what we did
This begins in the womb, when the mother’s beating heart creates rhythmic sound, pressure, and vibrations that are sensed by the developing fetus and provide constant rhythmic input to the organizing brain.
Furthermore, by rocking the baby while also feeding, warming, and loving them, the caring adults strengthen the primary associations between rhythm and regulation.
A person’s capacity to connect, to be regulating and regulated, to reward and be rewarded, is the glue that keeps families and communities together.
The brain is a meaning-making machine, always trying to make sense of the world.
If our view of the world is that people are good, then
we will anticipate good things from people. We project that expectation in our interactions with others and thereby actually elicit good from them. Our internal view of the world becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; we pr...
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stress. 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.
She smiled her big smile. And, shaking his head in defeat, he smiled back. Her “goodness projected” was contagious. She drew the best from this man, and her worldview was reinforced. For the next thirty minutes, the two of them played together as her parents looked on; he even got down on his hands and knees—expensive suit be damned—to give her a horsey ride around the dirty, crowded gate.
This is one of the central problems in our society; we have too many parents caring for children with inadequate supports.
If the hungry, cold, scared infant is inconsistently responded to—and regulated—by the overwhelmed caregiver, this creates an inconsistent, prolonged, and unpredictable activation of the child’s stress-response systems.
The hypervigilance of a boy living with domestic violence scanning his home for any sign of threat is very adaptive; in a classroom, this can prevent the child from paying attention to the teacher and result in the child
If, while the infant is creating her working model of the world, the caregiver responds in unpredictable ways, or is episodically rough, frustrated, cold, or absent, the child begins to create a different sort of worldview.
For the rest of the year, she never asked for help again.
but we all require some reciprocal social feedback to stay engaged.
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.
When the stress-response systems are activated in unpredictable or extreme or prolonged ways, the systems becomes overactive and overly reactive—in other words, sensitized. Over time, this can lead to functional vulnerability, and since the stress-response systems collectively
I definitely understand this aspect!
In contrast, predictable, moderate, and controllable activation of the stress-response systems, such as that seen with developmentally appropriate challenges in education, sport, music, and so forth, can lead to a stronger, more flexible stress-response capability—i.e., resilience.
If the parent is consistent, predictable, and nurturing, the stress-response systems become resilient.
(like reflecting on the meaning of life or daydreaming about an upcoming vacation).
dissociation.
You learn to escape into your inner world. You dissociate.
And over time, your capacity to retreat to that inner world—safe, free, in control—increases. A key part of that sensitized ability to dissociate is to be a people pleaser. You comply with what others want. You find yourself doing things to avoid conflict, to ensure that the other person in the interaction is pleased, as well as gravitating toward various regulating, but dissociative, activities.
