Bruce D. Perry Quotes

Biology isn't just genes playing out some unalterable script. It is sensitive to the world around it,

Relationships matter: the currency for systemic change was trust, and trust comes through forming healthy working relationships. People, not programs, change people.

More than 35 percent of the children exposed to a single traumatic event will develop serious mental health problems .. The real crisis of Katrina is the hundreds of thousands of ravaged, displaced and traumatized children.

Across generations, wariness of new individuals, groups, and ideas was built into the circuits of the human brain's alarm response because those who had this wariness were more likely to survive to reproduce. It was just safer to assume danger- and expect the worst- than to count on the kindness of strangers.

Fire can warm or consume,
water can quench or drown,
wind can caress or cut.
And so it is with human relationshps;
we can both create and destroy,
nurture and terrorize,
traumatize and heal each other

Negative emotions often make things even more memorable than positive ones because recalling things that are threatening - and avoiding those situations in the future if possible - is often critical to survival.

The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.

By understanding and increasing just this one capacity of the human brain, an enormous amount of social change can be fostered. Failure to understand and cultivate empathy, however, could lead to a society in which no one would want to live - a cold, violent, chaotic, and terrifying war of all against all. This destructive type of culture has appeared repeatedly in various times and places in human history and still reigns in some parts of the world. And it's a culture that we could be inadvertently developing throughout America if we do not address current trends in child rearing, education, economic inequality, and our core values.

It is the rare and strong person that can carry their trauma without having it spill into the next generation.

The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.

We need to allow children to try and fail. And when they do make the stupid, shortsighted decisions that come from inexperience, we need to let them suffer the results. At the same time we also need to provide balance by not setting policies that will magnify one mistake, like drug use or fighting, into a life-derailing catastrophe. Unfortunately, this is exactly what our current "zero tolerance" policies-
- that expel children from school for just one rule violation - do.