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

by Bruce D. Perry

Imagine that your annual review at work goes badly. Your supervisor gives you some negative feedback. You feel really upset. You keep thinking about it. You run it through your head again and again. You go back and talk to one of your colleagues. “Can you believe he said that? I don’t think that’s true!” And your colleague listens and reassures you: “No, that’s not true. He’s full of it.” You feel soothed for a bit. Then you call another colleague and run it by her. And you go home and you go over it with your partner. You’ve engaged in three, four, or five “doses” where you controlled how and when you talked about the distressing feedback. As your perspective is heard, you become regulated, reassured. The next day, you feel better. You have created a controllable and moderate revisiting of the distressing review, and that has changed your reaction to it. It is no longer as distressing. Originally you were dysregulated, you shut down the “rational” part of your head, distorted the comments, magnified them. But now you can reflect more accurately on the feedback, and maybe see some truth in the comments. That wasn’t possible until you could use your many relational interactions to revisit and regulate.