Childhood is a time of enormous vulnerability for human brain development. Few of us make it fully through childhood completely unscathed. In this book, developmental neuropsychiatrist Bruce Perry closely examines a wide variety of the many ways children's brains can be adversely impacted and then provides a variety of possibilities for addressing and repairing them.
3. Thread 1:
About 27% of women and 16% of men
report being sexually victimized during
childhood.
(pg. 3)
4. Thread 2:
A child with an overactive stress system
would pay close attention to the faces of
people like teachers and classmates,
where threat
might lurk,
but not to
benign things
like classroom
lessons.
(pg. 25)
5. Thread 3:
One of the few things I know for sure about
traumatized children is that they need pre-
dictability,
routine, a
sense of
control,
and stable
relationships
with stable
people.
(pg. 61)
7. Thread 5:
To fully recover traumatized children must
feel safe and in control. The last thing you
want to do is
force treatment
on them or use
any kind of
coercive
tactics.
(pg. 154)
8. Thread 6:
The “psychic pus” theory is that, like a boil
that needs to be lanced, certain memories
are toxic and must be excavated and dis-
cussed in
order to
recover from
trauma.
Memory
doesn’t work
this way.
(pg. 165)
9. Thread 7:
Human beings fear what they don’t under-
stand. The roots of the ugliest of human
behaviors – racism, ageism, misogyny,
anti-Semitism,
are the result
of a basic,
brain-mediated
response to
perceived
threat.
(pg. 225)
10. Thread 8:
Healing and recovery are impossible –
even with the best medications and
therapy in the
world – without
lasting, caring
connections to
others.
(pg. 232)
11. Thread 9:
An environment of intermittent care
punctuated by total abandonment may
be the worst of all possible worlds for a
child.
(pg. 113)
12. Thread 10:
“Gut feelings” are actually low-level
activations of the stress response system,
which is acutely attuned to the combina-
tion of
incoming
signals
that are
out of
context
or novel.
(pg. 208)