Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - This Neurobiologist Wants You To Ask One Question To Reframe Anxiety, Depression, And Trauma | Dr. Bruce Perry (Co-Interviewed by Dan's Wife, Bianca!)

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

The radical shift in perspective that can come when we change our question from “what’s wrong with you” to “what happened to you?”Dr. Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. is the Principal of the Neurosequential Network and a Professor (Adjunct) at the School of Allied Health, Human Services and Sport, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria  Australia. Over the last thirty years, Dr. Perry has been an active teacher, clinician and researcher in children’s mental health and the neurosciences holding a variety of academic positions. His work on the impact of abuse, neglect and trauma on the developing brain has impacted clinical practice, programs and policy across the world. Dr. Perry is the author, with Maia Szalavitz, of The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, a bestselling book based on his work with maltreated children and Born For Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered. Dr. Perry's most recent book, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (2021), co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, has been translated into 26 languages and has been on the New York Times Bestseller list for over 100 weeks after becoming #1 on the list in April of 2021.Related Episodes:The Art and Science of the World's Gooiest Cliche | Barbara FredricksonHow to Live with the Worst Things That Ever Happened to You | Stephanie FooAn Ace Therapist Gives Dan A Run For His Money | Dr. Jacob HamDeep Genealogy | Spring WashamDeep, Provocative Success Strategies From the “Yoda of Silicon Valley” | Jerry ColonnaSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/drbruceperryAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. One way for me to judge the power of any interview I've done for this show is how voluminous are my notes afterwards? Using that yardstick, this was a very powerful interview. Let me start here by giving credit to my wife, Bianca, who is my co-interviewer for this episode.

She is the one who suggested we recruit Dr. Bruce Perry as a guest after she read a book that Bruce co-authored with Oprah Winfrey. It's called What Happened to You? and it is about in part the radical shift in perspective that can come when we change our question about other people and about ourselves from what's wrong with you to what happened to you. We're talking here about trauma of course but not just big T trauma, We're talking here about trauma, of course, but not just big T trauma, a concept that may not apply to everyone, but also small T trauma, what my friend Dr. Mark Epstein calls the trauma of everyday life, the trauma that comes from living in a world characterized by impermanence and entropy.

That, that small T trauma is universal. And Dr. Perry, who's the principal of the Neuro-Sequential Network and a professor in the departments of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, has some incredibly interesting thoughts about how to heal. What I found interesting is that healing, which can

sound like a grandiose and maybe out of reach concept, is per Dr. Perry, a much more down to earth process. Part of his prescription is to focus on small moments, what some researchers call microinteractions. He also talks about the value of moderate challenges, including travel, which I found interesting, and how to get better at making up after the inevitable arguments we're going to have with people, which psychologists call rupture and repair. We also talk about the concept of safety,

which can be controversial and sound to some, like PC nonsense, but from a neurobiological standpoint, it makes a lot of sense and it made me reflect quite a bit about how to get the most out of my relationships. Oh, and we also talk about where personal responsibility fits into all of this when you switch from what's the matter with you to what happened to you. Like I said, fascinating interview. Dr. Bruce Perry coming right up.

But first, a little BSP or blatant self-promotion. I want to let you know that we just restocked the merch store over on danharris.com. We've got sweatshirts, t-shirts, baseball hats, tote bags. Some of them are nice and clean and just say 10% happier and some of the stuff has my signature profanity on it. I also want to say that my wife Dr. Bianca Harris oversaw all of the aesthetic decisions on this so you can have some confidence that this stuff is good, high quality, looks good, etc., etc.

Go check it out, shop.danharris.com. Also want to tell you about a course that we're highlighting over on the 10% Happier app. It's called Healthy Habits. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal and the meditation teacher Alexis Santos. It's great stuff. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app

wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% dot com. That's one word all spelled out. Hello, I'm Emily. And I'm Anna. And we're the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And just a warning, our latest season will feature a lot of accents.

Can I just check what accents? Because... I can't tell this story without going all in. Okay, I'm scared to ask, but can you give us a clue? Why I'm Ant? Oh, Ant-and-or-de? I'm afraid not, and it's not Alan Shearer either. I am talking about a young woman plucked from obscurity who rose to become the Neershin sweetheart. A woman who's had a lot of surnames. And

has ditched them all to become just Cheryl. Love it. Girls Aloud fans, strap in. We're going to follow Cheryl from her Girl Band Glory days, getting together with Ashley Cole and the many scandals and humiliations that followed. Not to mention a near death experience. Oh she's been through a lot. And she has needed every ounce of her northern grit to see her through. I promise you it's going to be an emotional rollercoaster. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.

I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopane. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in Yep. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're going to be exploring the life of Margaret Thatcher. The first female leader of Britain.

Her 11-year premiership completely overhauled British society. The political legacy of Thatcherism is both pervasive, but also controversial. So who was the woman behind the policies? Wow, what a titan of modern British history, Peter. It's kind of intimidating, actually. We've spent days, days recording this one.

And just to cut it down, there is so much that happens over the course of Margaret Thatcher's life that we've had to think really hard about what we can include. And this is, of all the characters we've done so far, the one who's had the most personal impact on my conscious, waking, real-time life. I mean, I lived through her, I was born under her.

I'm a Thatcher baby. That's going to be set to dance music. So follow Legacy now from wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Dr. Bruce Perry, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure. Dr. Bianca Harris, welcome back to the show.

Thank you. Also my pleasure. I'm gonna just say unusual. I'm actually gonna direct the first question at Bianca, but it's gonna be about you, Bruce. Bianca, this was your idea to do this episode. So I'm gonna direct the first question at Bianca, but it's gonna be about you, Bruce. Bianca, this was your idea to do this episode, so I'm just curious, why did you wanna have Dr. Perry on the show?

Yeah, I found this book, What Happened to You, to be sort of a game changer in terms of how I think about what is wrong with me, which is really not the way one should look at it, as you'll explain. Background being that about a year ago, I was preparing a book proposal on imposter syndrome really addressing the feelings that I have in those moments, notably at the hospital

where sort of intellect and performance are really measures of your worth. And I was very interested in the fear response and in my research came upon your book. But what I got out of it was so much more because my thesis or at least my approach to my investigation was literally to ask the question what is wrong with me and what are the origins of that. And I kept coming up against shame. So as much as I was revealing things, I was uncomfortable and not fully sure where I was going with it. So your book very much helped me to recenter and ask the question differently. And the rest I just found to be incredibly revealing in terms of the impact of trauma

on the developing brain and on who we are as adults. Wow. That's actually very gratifying to hear. It's interesting because I have, I think most of my life, I still every once in a while feel like somebody's going to grab me on the shoulder and go, hey, you're from North Dakota. What are you doing here? It's not permeating imposter syndrome, but it's episodic, right? There'll be a certain context where you're like, wow, am I really here doing this? And I always saw a little part of my head because my buddies from high school would just be laughing at me.

I'm wearing a suit and I'm acting like I can answer this question and I look like I'm a responsible guy and they know better. Let me just start with the title of the book because that was so compelling to Bianca, obviously. But I would like to hear your point of view. Why make this switch from what's the matter with me

to what happened to me or what happened to you? I think that is a reframing question. It really makes someone take a historical perspective on the present circumstance. And the origin of that phrase actually came from a colleague of mine who was, I knew peripherally, but he'd been working with another person I knew really well, Dr. Sandy Bloom, and they were just beginning to introduce the importance of a developmental history of life experience, including traumatic experience, into their clinical work.

Because it used to be you'd come in and somebody say, oh, Billy's aggressive and inattentive and he throws things and he spits and kicks. And you go, all right, well, you check this box and this box and this box and you have ADHD and chronic disorder and we're going to treat you because there's something wrong with you. And over time, those of us who are kind of developmentally oriented recognize that you can kick and spit and be inattentive and hostile for a lot of different reasons. And the intervention you use to try to help somebody is going to vary depending upon how you got there.

So if you got there because you have condition X or history X, you'll interact with them in a different way. And so it literally reframed the whole approach to clinical work. And the reason it's the title of the book was because, and I think I say in the book, I've known Oprah for many, many, many, many years. And during that time, we'd had many conversations about behavior in people and circumstances and bad things that have happened to people and so forth. And I kept trying to teach her the things that I was learning about, you know, what's important and how this happens and how you can help people.

And she's very, very smart. So she picked up a lot of this stuff really quickly. And you know, fast forward to 25 years later, she's a special correspondent for 60 Minutes doing a story about women who've been that had experienced domestic violence and they're in the shelter and it's in Milwaukee and it's kind of she has a soft spot for Milwaukee because she kind of grew up there in part. And so when she was visited this place, they said, oh, we use the model that Dr. Perry used, you know, developed and she's like, you mean Dr. Bruce, Dr. we use the model that Dr. Perry used, you know, developed. And she's like, you mean Dr. Bruce, Dr. Bruce Perry?

I know Dr. Bruce. So she called me up and said, do you want to be on 60 minutes? And I'm like, not really. Cause I honestly, I'm not, you know, I'm not very good in front of a camera and a lot. So I decided to do it. I went out and we had an interview and we saw some stuff. And afterwards we were having lunch. And she was talking about one of the boys there

who had really horrific background, but they'd done all kinds of things to help. Four years, you know, they'd jumped through hoops, they'd gotten him therapists, they'd gotten him opportunities, they'd gotten him opportunities, and still he was really struggling. And she said, I don't know, what's wrong with that kid? And I said, well, you know, the real question

isn't what's wrong with him, it's what happened to him that he can't take advantage of these things that people are offering? You know, for me, it was a phrase that I'd been using a lot, and a lot of people don't feel they've been using, but it finally crystallized for her the things that we've been talking about. And in that moment, all of the things we've been talking about kind of fell in place and she understood it from a different perspective. And I realized that also in that moment, what a crappy teacher I must be, that it took years for her to finally get it in one sentence you know one phrase she understands it and all that talking to her for years

did nothing anyway that's your imposter syndrome talking but I'm curious for somebody listening how would it be helpful for us to reframe the question. And then I'd like to hear how it helped Bianca, but from you, Bruce, what is the value to an individual to moving from what's wrong with me, what's the matter with me, to what happened to me? Well, I do a lot of my work with children and adolescents and some adults, but a lot of times the behaviors

of those children are disturbing. They upset adults. They make teachers get mad, parents get frustrated, and it changes the relationship between those two people, the child that's struggling and the adult that's trying to help. And when you actually change your frame of reference, if you knew the story of some of these kids that were acting out in school, it would break your heart. And so the way you interact with them in the moment is going to be more a reflection of your empathic awareness of the pain that they're having as opposed to the fact that they're pain in the ass and they don't follow directions. And so once that shift takes place, you're in a position to be relationally sympathetic,

more compassionate and more likely to create a connection that can lead to some healing for that person. Whereas if you don't have that perspective and you go, you're just a pain in the ass, I'm sick of this and I'm kicking you out of class, you can literally change the whole trajectory of that child's life. And that reframe is essential if we're gonna really address some of the problems

we're having right now in education and in mental health and in child welfare. And all of these systems we have to try to help people have to shift away from blaming people and move more towards understanding people. And when we do that, I think that we'll create better practices and programs and policy. What about in how I think about myself

or anybody thinks about themselves, what's the value of switching these questions? Biggest value is that you start to give yourself, that same shift can happen with yourself, right? You're nicer to yourself. You don't have these unrealistic expectations. You know, I should lose 20 pounds and I should get more in better condition

and I should read a book a week and all these aspirational things that are fine have, but very few of us can consistently achieve those all the time. Instead of beating yourself up, you just need to say, all right, I got a lot on my plate. I'm a little over ambitious. I'm comparing myself to these unrealistic ideals and slow down. Just give yourself a break. And you're doing the best you can and just keep going.

Just the power of showing up is just amazing. But what happens is it's like a diet. When you can't reach this unrealistic sort of set of expectations, people tend to quit. So instead of getting up the next day and going, all right, I didn't achieve my goal of steps or I didn't work out every day last week, I'm not going to quit working out. I'm just going to get up, all right, get up, get back on a horse, you know, go as far as you can, as long as you can, and as well as you can.

And that leads to getting better. And that leads to being more, the more forgiving you are, oddly enough, the more forgiving of yourself about all these imperfections, the more they start to disappear. So Bianca, what was the effect of reframing the question for yourself in your thinking about your own life mind behavior? I think the first step actually was appreciating through your work and your conversation with Oprah that was extremely user friendly, that trauma as a word, which we should discuss as the definition, is certainly there's a big T trauma as we call it, the big things, the car accidents and the violence and the assault and the war.

And then there are traumas of everyday life. And I think it's very difficult as someone who's had some of both at any given time to not be sure how to validate any one of those things. If I've been through a big trauma around divorce, my parents' divorce or my personal health or some kind of assault, well, it's not as bad as it is for other people. So does that really count? And if I'm having more trouble with, you know, practices in daily life that should not be so difficult, but that trigger me in a way that those big things did, well, then I would judge myself as dysfunctional for that too. So what your book did, which most other books that I've read on trauma and the brain and

psychology and behavior don't do, is actually normalize the experience of trauma in life. I think you both highlight the very important special circumstances around PTSD and circumstances that nobody argues would be trauma, but also that we have experiences that are traumatic based on things that we don't fully understand. So I guess in that vein then, if you could provide a definition of trauma that can help people sort of look at their lives and not dismiss their own traumatic experiences because they don't fall in the major category. Right. You know, Bianca, that whole area is some place that our field broadly is getting better at talking about. For the longest time, it's still in certain academic arenas, there's still this argument about, you know,

the event is, does that reach a threshold of being life threatening and et cetera, et cetera, so you can give this diagnosis. And I think the more important part of life experience that we're learning shifts the biology of your body that could be labeled traumatic can range tremendously from person to person in context to context. So the definitions that I think are useful is to start to think about there's the 3E thing I talk about in the book, and that's

a conceptualization that was developed by a consensus panel at SAMHSA, which I think was a really a lot of hard work, but I think it was a good result. So the three E's are this, there's the event, right? So like you say, you can read the paper and you go, oh, these kids were in a school shooting. That's certainly, that sounds traumatic, right? That's an event. But there's the experience of kids at that shooting and people impacted by that

shooting will be very different depending upon how close you were to the event, how aware you were of what was going on, whether there were people around that made you feel safe and so forth. So literally the internal experience that you have when that event's taking place is also very important. And then the third thing is what are the long-term effects? So you can have a child who's in a big, has this internal huge stress response, but a month later is fine because he's had all kinds of

support and opportunities to kind of work it through and make sense out of it and now feels safe again back at school. And so all of those factors will influence how people carry that forward, how that will influence people. And I think one of the more important parts of what our work is beginning

to help people understand better is that, first of all, coming from the perspective and an awareness that human beings are relational creatures, where we are literally neurobiologically interconnected to the people around us. And so the experiences and the behaviors and the sensory cues that people around us provide literally change our biology. And this can change your biology in good ways and in bad ways. And all of the neurobiological networks in our body that are responsible and mediate our stress responses are very, very tightly yoked to the relational neurobiology that we use to read and you can have a group of coworkers who don't like you and they make it clear.

And it's not in these overt ways. I mean, they'll come up to you and say, oh, we don't like you, we hate you. They do little things, you know, like they'll talk and then they'll look at you and giggle. And at lunch, you know, you sit down at a table and they'll get up and, oh, I got to run and everybody peels away. You know, there's a lot of little things that don't seem like trauma, but the reality is to your body, the internal effect, the internal experience of being marginalized in that setting, and then the long-term effects are exactly the same as if you'd been in some big capital T trauma event. And so I think this is something that we need to think about and better understand in context of being an outsider whenever

there's some sort of circumstance. And the outsider could be you're the wrong race. You don't have the right gender identification. You don't have the right, you have an accent when you speak. You don't have the right TV aura or presence or whatever it is. You can be marginalized in whatever group you're in and have the result be a physiological shift in your body that will literally increase your risk for physical health problems, mental health problems, social problems, and so forth. And I think the more we understand that, the more we can recognize the power of helping people feel safe, included, making an environment where they feel like they belong.

And a lot of this stuff that kind of is getting made fun of now when people talk about inclusion and diversity, you know, all of that, that people are going after that in part because they don't understand this physiology. I mean, if you understand the neurobiology of this stuff, you would have a much better appreciation of the impact of being an outsider in a mainstream culture. And honestly, I think that movement has unfortunately not really done a very good job describing the biology of this. And maybe that will be one of the nice things that can come out of this work. What about inherited trauma? We talk a lot about, you hear that phrase tossed around. Is there research to back up this notion?

How does it work? How should we think about it in our own lives? Yeah, you know, that's a very big area. And I think heritability is some, again, this is something that would be really, if we were more a science literate population, we could talk about this a little bit easier, but heritability doesn't just happen because of genetics, right? The language you speak is heritable because the people around you speak that language, but there's no genetics that codes for English

versus Norwegian versus Spanish. It's all the same genetic matrix that allows us to speak language. But a component of the heritability is the developmental experiences of what you hear and how you learn that language. So we can grow up and create an environment So, we can grow up and create an environment where we've created any transgenerational passage of racist perspectives, for example, or racist beliefs, or racist attitudes, racist

jokes. That helps contribute to the heritable trauma of people who are the target of those systems, those jokes, those policies, those practices. We do pass things from generation to generation to generation, both good and bad. In the book, we can pass the fear of dogs from generation to generation if there were people in your family who are deathly afraid of dogs. And so every time a little child in your family was around a dog or saw a dog, the terror, the feeling of the adult would be absorbed by that child. And that child would literally

develop the same fear of dogs based upon what might have been the experience of a great grandparent. So that can be an experience mediated heritability, but it's also possible that certain epigenetic, basically chemical elements that influence how our genes turn on and off, those are heritable. And experience changes those epigenetic factors, which can be transmitted for multiple generations. And so there are really interesting animal studies that show that you can teach animals to be afraid of a certain smell, for example, rats in this case.

And they're afraid of that smell because they get shocked every time they have that smell. And then three generations, their offspring will have the same style response to that smell as even without ever being exposed to it, ever being shocked because of that smell. And so there is some epigenetic passage of the physiological associations we make about specific fear related experiences and events. So, but it's a young field. We've got a lot to learn yet. So. So I think what we've established thus far is that trauma may be a word that

listeners have a variety of feelings about. They might see themselves in that word or might think it's actually limited to people who've been through something extreme. However, I think what we've established is that it is just part of the fabric of being alive, and it can come at us through the experiences in our lives or the experiences of the people who live before us. And that all makes sense to me. I think the question that comes up in my mind as I think about this, you know, to take us right back to the top, the reframing from what's the matter with you to what happened to you is where does personal responsibility fit in all of this? I can imagine people listening to this thinking, well, if you ask the question that way, are you taking any personal responsibility out of the picture? Yeah, again, a very good question. And I think you're right, it's a very common formulation when people start to talk about the relationship between a traumatic event and a behavior or

the way somebody acts. And absolutely worth taking a really deep dive into this because Absolutely worth taking a really deep dive into this because you can explain a behavior. It does not mean that you're exculpating it. You don't necessarily... You can certainly... I don't want to necessarily pull on the Middle East right now, but there's horrible things that happen between peoples. When sort of the othering happens and tribalism happens throughout all history in the extreme, you basically can find narratives where a grandparent lived through an event where tribe X raided our clan and killed somebody and raped the women and took off the children and did all these horrible things. And then when those children got older, they went and did that to the other clan. History is characterized by that kind of stuff. But I do think that the thing that I think is important

about a lot of this is recognizing that the more you understand the biology underneath this, the more you realize that you actually have agency, you have the ability to intentionally control and change a lot of the things about the way you're wired. That's the interesting thing, the very same neurobiological characteristics that make you develop trauma-related sensitivity when you're exposed to a bad thing also can help you change that sensitivity in a good way if you have appropriate small doses of revisiting that experience, that stressor. And so that's kind of what therapeutics does. It allows you an opportunity when you have some predictability,

you have control over how much you talk about it, when you talk about it, what part of it you talk about. But if you do that repetitively enough, literally that changes the physiology of your body, including the physiology of your brain. So you can get better, and that's a controllable thing. That's a really important part of healing, I think, is recognizing that there are controllable aspects of your life

that will make whatever burden you have easier to carry. One of the biggest challenges we've had in the last couple of years is dealing with large scale natural disasters or large scale events like war. We can kind of do an analysis of the capacity of the mental health community and then the need of the people impacted by war or the earthquake. And every time we do that, we see

that the traditional mental health system is completely ill-equipped or unable to meet the needs of the people who have experienced traumatic events. And in part, I think that that was a good thing because it made us recognize that, you know what? Human beings have been experiencing trauma for the whole history of our species. And cultures have always come up with some way to manage loss, grief, sadness, and they have incorporated these practices that are very, very powerful, pattern, repetitive, rhythmic activity, which sort of tones down certain parts

of your stress response system. But different cultures use dance, they use song, they use community meals, they use community rituals, they use activities that bring people together in connection with each other to be comforters for each other. And those are very healing phenomenon, which I think really in the long run

will be part of what we have to do. I mean, our Western world is so vulnerable to big traumatic events and small traumatic events because we are so fragmented and we are so, I hate to say it, but we're sort of culturally bankrupt. I mean, we don't have routines and rituals around all of these things, like when people get sick, when people die, when people move, when people get a new job, when people make a transition into an adult life. You know, many cultures have these very, very well-established

centuries-long heritages of putting these practices together. And I believe that a lot of them have these, the elements that would be helpful for people trying to heal from loss, trauma, stress, distress, anxiety, depression, and so forth. And that's kind of the direction that a lot of people are beginning to take now around focusing more on the community elements that create safety, stability, predictability that would allow people who experience trauma to better heal.

Because what we know is that if you provide somebody who is in a community that's fragmented and they don't have any connection to extended family and they got no connection to their community. They have no, they're really sort of have poverty relationships. If you send them to the best therapist in Manhattan once a week, they're not going to do very well because we heal in community. So going back to the top of that answer, this isn't about stripping away personal responsibility, explaining away people's behavior, no matter how problematic it is or whatever. It's about understanding it in its proper context, because that is the only way in which healing and personal responsibility can actually take place down the road. Absolutely. That's exactly right. And that and we think this

is why, you know, this is why I wrote this book with Oprah, you know, one of the biggest issues, I think, in all of science is that we have people that are doing great work, but they tend to be very poor communicators. And I mean, look at the terrible communication that happened during the pandemic. It was just all over the place. We just did a terrible job of engaging and communicating to the public. And so you've got all of this insanity out there. And I think that that's part of what we, well, academic medicine needs to value the translators among us better and help people communicate to other people some of these concepts and not get so pissed off every time that communication process

out of necessity distills or simplifies something. Because the reality is, you can drown people in factoids, but it doesn't help them in the end. You need to be able to communicate some concepts and principles and facts. And I think that the more people understand these things, the more we develop, we build capacity as a society to continue to grow in positive ways. And I think one of the key areas where we do need to learn more and share more is around this whole issue of the importance of connectedness, the power of relationships, you know, the way our stress response systems work, the fact that, you know, the just basic fundamental stuff about state-dependent functioning,

which is basically saying that when somebody feels safe, they think better than when they feel threatened. And I mean, if you wanna understand American politics, if you don't understand state-dependent functioning, you will forever be scratching your head about how so many supposedly smart people can do so many stupid things. But it's about threat.

Fear has basically a tool that's always been used by people in power to dumb down the populace. So that makes them easier to lead and easier to influence and so forth. The more we understand that as a people, the less, I think, the less vulnerable we will be to fear mmongering perspectives and we can think for ourselves Wow, I sound like I'm a politician here. This is crazy Well a politician I would actually vote for Coming up dr. Bruce Perry talks about the definition of EMDR and the importance of moving your body the hardest type of trauma to deal with the perks of getting in touch with the fact that to quote quote Dr. Perry, everybody is wandering around in a fucking fog and how

this perspective helps us become more generous in our lives, both toward ourselves and others, and how it is never too late to heal trauma. British Scandal, the show where every week we bring you stories from this green and not always so pleasant land. We've looked at spies, politicians, media magnates, a king, no one is safe. And knowing our country, we won't be out of a job anytime soon. Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hello, I'm Hannah. And I'm Saruti. And we are the hosts of Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast.

Every week on Red-Handed, we get stuck into the most talked about cases. From Idaho student killings, the Delphi murders and our recent rundown of the Murdoch Saga. Last year, we also started a second weekly show, Shorthand, which is just an excuse for us to talk about anything we find interesting because it's our show and we can do what we like. We've covered the death of Princess Diana, an unholy Quran written in Saddam Hussein's blood, the gruesome history of European witch hunting, and the very uncomfortable phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human

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over on the 10% Happier app taught by Kelly McGonigal and Alexis Santos. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app taught by Kelly McGonigal and Alexis Santos. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps. It feels egocentric to pull it back to the individual, but that's really all I can speak on personally. And I think relating to your question, Dan, about understanding and does that sort of obviate the need for accountability. For me, understanding, I can liken it to sort of a dust storm. It helps it settle. And then you can see the sort of landscape and you can identify individual things that need to be addressed. But until it sort of calms down and you can see what's what, it is just overwhelming. And you're

constantly triggered. There's stress responses all over the place, and you can't even trust your own impression and response to things. So Dan and I have had this conversation recently about is understanding enough. I wouldn't say it's enough, but it's a huge part of it. I don't know how much just understanding alone might change your neurobiology, but it certainly provides, I think, you know, the fork at which you can choose what, as you say, therapeutic path you might go down. And in my case, you know, I've been doing EMDR, which is a trauma-based modality that maybe in a minute you can speak on.

But I have found in my reading, both around, again, significant traumas, but also less significant ones, for lack of a better word, that a lot of the tools that are used for people with PTSD are actually very, are used for people with PTSD are actually very, very useful for people without that clinical diagnosis. And I don't think that enough of the sort of lay community, even therapists know enough about these sort of mind-body experiences, and I'm just learning about them, to understand

that your brain really can be rewired. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are on sort of next steps if you do have the opportunity to understand yourself enough to go there. Can somebody define EMDR and also list some other pattern repetitive rhythmic activities just to make this very practical for people who of the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive,

the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, the cognitive, to the side and looking to the other side back and forth and back and forth in a certain rhythm while you were thinking about the traumatic event. And so the idea is to sort of bring the traumatic event or an element of the event to mind. Then you start to feel uncomfortable and distressed and then you do this short-circuiting activity. And it works.

It's amazing. If you have a discrete event and you're 25 years old, you have a traumatic event, there's a lot of really good data to show. And I've seen it happen with people that I've worked with, where two or three sessions can actually make somebody feel significantly better about that specific event. So I think it can have tremendously positive impact.

I'm glad you brought up EMDR because I think it's a very powerful technique and approach, but it is essentially a variant of traditional pattern-repetitive bilateral somatosensory activities that were part of every single healing ritual that you can look at across the planet from primitive cultures or not primitive cultures, aboriginal indigenous cultures. And the reason that on all of the different continents, those elements emerged independently is because they work. That when you do pattern, repetitive, rhythmic activity that involve bilateral activation, it could be dancing, drumming, EMDR, davening, lots of kinds of meditative prayer involved, that even the chanting has this rhythm, that

actually is tapping into this very deeply built-in memory that almost everybody has that originated in utero when our brain was first making associations between interoceptive feedback about are you hungry, thirsty, cold, and sensory input that was coming from outside the womb that was predominantly rhythmic and from maternal heart rate and the opening and closing of the valves of the heart. And so that the association between pattern, repetitive, rhythmic stuff as being a way to kind of calm us and regulate us, whether it's through breathing, whether it's through walking or swimming or running or whatever, that's a universally useful element that I think, for example, in modern educational settings,

we've kind of cut out. And I mean, the irony is that all the research shows it that that's a really effective way to get information into your cortex to learn new things is learn it in movement and you retain better, you test better, all kinds of stuff. But that simple piece of information, I think everybody can connect to when they start thinking about their own life, right? I get all, I really have a bad day and I need to go work out. I need to go running. I need to go for a bike ride. I need to go swimming. I need to take a walk. I need to listen to music. Whatever it is. Some people are small motor people. I need to do my needle work. I need to do my drawing. Whatever it is. But it's all pattern repetitive somatosensory stuff. And it really gets into the

lower parts of the brain and helps these core regulatory networks that are involved in keeping us in balance. It helps them basically get signals that say you're safe. And then that leads to this cascade of other things that makes it easier to function in relationships and so forth. But, and I have no idea how I got here. I'm off on a tangent. I went off on a complete tangent. We're talking about EMDR, right?

Well, no, it's very relevant. We're talking about EMDR, but those pattern movements and in some ways, it sounds like you're saying those things are useful no matter the origin of your trauma and the impact on your biology. So if you don't want to spend however many years in therapy to truly understand the roots of X, Y, and Z, doing those things may still alleviate your suffering. Absolutely. I agree.

That's exactly right. And what I'm also saying is that I love EMDR, far north in Canada, and there's no EMDR practitioner. I send to an elder and they do traditional drumming. And to me, it's kind of having the same impact. Now, the thing, and again, of having the same impact. Now the thing, and again, I don't want to, it's hard to do this with words because I'm really not that good with words, but when you experience a traumatic event, your brain creates a memory in multiple different parts of your brain. Not just the part of your brain that remembers names and faces and phone numbers, which is the top, the cortex. You also remember the emotion,

right? The fear. And then you also even lower in the brain, your body and parts of your body literally retain elements of association or memory that recreate the physiological state of fear. So literally, you can 20 years later, you can see a picture of something like a car accident that you might have been in and your heart rate will go up. And if you could track all these other physiological things, they would activate too. That's the tiny little residual memory. But the thing about EMDR that's really cool is that this trauma memory is interconnected. There's multiple components to this complete memory from the traumatic event. So you can remember it and you can feel what you felt like and then you have the physiological response. But EMDR and some of these other

pattern repetitive rhythmic things, what they help you do is that you are helping short circuit the default to that distressful part of the memory. Because when you do pattern repetitive rhythmic activity, you're activating a much more powerful memory that was built into your brain and utero when your brain was making an association between being safe, not cold, not hungry, not thirsty, because you're in utero, and hearing, and so replicating that, that's more powerful than the physiological shred of that trauma memory. And so if you do EMDR while you're thinking about the event, you literally are able to unyoke them. One of the most challenging and difficult forms of traumatic

experience to deal with is when the trauma took place prior to like age three and you've got the mechanisms to create linear narrative memory and if the traumatic event took place in context of some of the primary relationships you had as an infant or young child. And so what happens is, and this is just a heartbreaking phenomenon, is if the people responsible for caring for you were also the people who episodically hurt you or were gone or scared you or did whatever, that your brain makes an association between certain attributes of relational intimacy and threat. And so what happens is later on as you get older, you get into relationships of all sorts. You use all kinds of protective practices, defensive practices to prevent somebody from getting too close. And if somebody does get too close, usually you adapt these maladaptive ways to drive them away. And that's the heartbreaking

thing is a lot of people have no idea what's going on. Why do they sabotage relationships? Why does intimacy, why do I long for it? But then when I do get it, I have to control every aspect of the closeness. And if I don't, I feel completely overwhelmed. And that's when, that's not always, but it's usually because there was some aspect of relational inconsistency early, early in life. And that's one of the harder forms of developmental trauma to kind of deal with. I can relate to that in so many ways. But one thing that has helped me, given that, like you said, without a conscious awareness of the narrative that you could have put together before you had word choice, which I can kind of create a story around it. But most helpful for me around that potentially damaging narrative is understanding where that person came from, not in a way that shifts accountability completely away from you. And I say accountability meaning to take care of

your behavior and your problems in the now. It's not up to that person. But it helped me understand where that parent, for example, came from in their experience, what kind of emotional trauma did they inherit. And it goes back to the question of what happened to you. Because it's not just about what happened to me, it's about what happened to that person. And it does depersonalize it in a way that removes some of the heartbreak of not being able to fully describe the scene of the crime, if you will, because you recognize that whatever it was,

the behavior was a function of where that person came from. They probably are suffering in their history the way you might be now. And again, the dust storm settles enough that you pick up the piece that you think you might now be able to modify. the piece that you think you might now be able to modify. Yeah.

You know, I think the beauty of getting older is that hopefully we all are walking around in a fucking fog. I mean, I hate to say it, but sorry. No, no, that's what we love talking about. That's his love language. Yeah, exactly. More fucks the better. We have this fantasy that, that, that everybody's life is somehow better. I think as you get older, you kind of hear more stories, right?

You kind of see through the veneer of the families that you thought were the perfect families and the people you thought were perfect. And you realize, man, everybody's, nobody, first of of all nobody gets out of this alive and second of all man everybody's had their thing and I think if you can give you know if you can get that perspective it just it makes it easier for you to be generous of heart, not just for the people around you, but for yourself. I think I can't tell you how many people I know, some of whom are just wildly successful, who are just inside feeling so inadequate and unhappy.

And I think it's so important, Bianca, just like what you said, that you just kind of realize that the things that of realize that, the things that happened to me, the people who at that time I felt like they let me down, something had to happen to them. And then when you look back and you go, wow, you hear some of those stories, you're like, I'm surprised they were as nice to me as they were considering what happened to them. And life is not easy. Life is just plain not easy. And it's hard being a parent, and it's hard showing up and being consistent every day

in any relationship. But I think that's the thing about learning about this is that, listen, it's never too late, and showing up is like a huge part of it. Show up. Just show up. There was some poet who said something like, if we could read the secret histories of our enemies, we would view them in a completely different light.

And I think that's kind of what you're both pointing at here. You know, Abraham Lincoln said something that is very much like that. There was a congressman that he really disliked. And at one point he said to somebody in his cabinet, he said, I really dislike that man. And then he paused for a moment and said, I must get to know him. Because he's like, he recognized it like if I really got to know him, then I wouldn't, just like you said, Dan, I wouldn't dislike him as much. Well, that's the route to another Lincoln phrase, malice toward none, right? I mean, that's how you get there, I think.

I'm not saying I'm there, but I do think that's the path. Coming up, Dr. Bruce Perry talks about more practical ways for healing trauma, including the simplest, most actionable and effective thing you can do if you have any kind of anxiety, sadness, depression, demoralization or trauma, how to tell if your adaptive traits have become maladaptive and how to stop that, how parents can help their children, and his understanding of rupture and repair. I bring on an icon like when John Stamos and I talked about internet trolls hating on Disney adults Or when Jordan Peele explained why we love scary movies, even though the world is already creepy as fuck Tune in to learn a little and laugh a lot cuz your girl keeps it real

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about science, technology, and innovation, and the world around us. This summer, bring your imagination out into the world and find your wow. Visit wondery.com slash summer of wow to find new episodes of your favorite shows and to download scavenger hunts for the entire family. I like that we're talking about practical stuff that people can do. We've talked about EMDR and

pattern repetitive rhythmic activity. If we could stay in this vein, that would be great. I mean, I know in your book, Bruce, you talk about a couple of things that I'll throw at you right now, you can pick up whichever one you think seems most helpful. You talk about healing happening best in small moments. You talk about relational health, the practice of rupture and repair. Dan, that's the magic. And I think the thing that's so nice about that, I'm glad you brought that up because people sometimes walk out of something like this and go, oh man, I need to learn how to do this or that, or I have to be consistent and like, oh, I gotta do MDR,

I gotta walk every day, whatever it is. But what we know about the brain and about neural networks is that they change, these systems change with very brief but appropriately targeted activity. targeted activity. And so, as I said before, human beings are very relational creatures. And when we get the nonverbal signals from another person that they're truly trying to understand, that they're truly not concerned about what's on their cell phone in this moment, that they really want to hear us. That literally is a physiological burst of positive reward. We feel pleasure in that connection and safety. But also, in that moment, we're wide open for the tiniest little nugget of cognitive or social or motor learning, right? You can absorb a ton in a very short period of time. So that doesn't mean as like, if you tell a teacher,

gosh, you know, you need to really be there for your kids. And we talk to teachers about some of this stuff and they all get nervous. Like, oh my God, I already have so much stuff to teach. And then we try to reassure them that, listen, it's a moment, it's the moment. It's the moment. It's the moment when Billy really feels when you say that's a really good job that you really mean it. And

for that three seconds, you're with Billy. It doesn't take that much. Just be completely present in that moment and positive things will happen. And what we've seen in our research is that the best predictor of how anybody's doing at any given moment in time is the current quality and density of their relational interactions. It's much more powerful than their history of adversity. It's much more powerful than their family history of mental illness, it's much more powerful than any other indicator that we track. And this is why we love stuff like band and theater and sport and after school programs

where kids become part of a tiny little community where they're getting these moments for positive relational connection that really make a big difference. So it's really about, again, it's about biology. It's about learning that you can change the brain. You'll have more change to the brain if you have 31 minute consequences or 31 minute interactions than if you have one 30 minute interaction. And it will be much more powerful. And so it's those little conversations by the water cooler. It's the little conversations when you're walking down the street and you see your neighbor on a

porch. When you see the neighborhood kid running by and you take a moment and ask him about, did you make the basketball team? Just little doses of relational engagement are what really help people feel physiologically healthy. And that's actually what builds resilience as well. Just to say, we'll drop in the show notes listeners, an interview we did about this with Barbara Fredrickson, who's really pioneered the research into what she calls micro interactions and the power of these small doses. And it's a practice anybody can engage in.

Absolutely. Sort of indirectly along these lines, we talk about the ways in which the brain adapts to trauma and we're largely talking about stressful things and the fear response. But are there any generalizable ways that the traumatized brain might actually develop some strengths, not just in the sort of post-traumatic wisdom category where you've learned from it, but is there anything sort of deeply rooted in the biology that would make somebody perhaps more prone to feeling and empathy and other compensatory functions? That's a great question. There's been some really fascinating work done on the qualities that make somebody a good interviewer. The more you have actually been in an environment where there's

relational unpredictability and grow up in an alcoholic house and if you've been victims of episodic abuse, you are a much better interviewer of people as a social worker, a cop. You tend to be a much better observer of human behavior. I haven't looked at this carefully, but I would suspect that you're also probably a better writer and a filmmaker and artist. Not all, but many kids who are in situations that have been traumatic

become tremendously good observers of human behavior. And now sometimes that ends up being part of what allows them to kind of take over a class and or, you know, drive people crazy, you know, in an organization and so forth. So you can learn a lot of maladaptive, manipulative techniques, but you can also learn those techniques can be used in a way that can help you be a good leader and and be a good listener and be a good interviewer. I think that also pertains to things we can do which is again having your eyes open and understanding helps us better identify when our

behaviors and reactivity and responses have developed to a point where they're not advantageous anymore to survival and in fact they're quite damaging. Is there a point at which we, the human, experiencing it without having necessarily undergone 10 years of therapy to sort of see our story a little more clearly? How do we see that our more sort of adaptive traits have become maladaptive and we can stop that? Usually the world tells you when you start to see like a big mismatch between what you thought was going on and what the feedback you're getting. And so when you're in school the feedback you get is like you're not doing well and you're not getting

invited to birthday parties and you aren't the best kid on the basketball team and you thought you were the best shot and you're really not the best shot. And so you start to get a little feedback from the world. And as adults though, it's a little bit harder. Honestly, the adult world tends to be a little bit more tolerant of these sort of variances in perception. And there are a lot of people that just make their way all the way through, who continue to have a very distorted understanding of how they're coming across. You know, they don't recognize that people keep looking

at the watch that, you know, it's like, it's like, finally, I'm okay, I'm leaving, I'm turning the light, just lock the door when door when you leave. The people that don't learn how to read non-verbal cues, we try subtly to teach them, but some of the people are just like clueless. And I'm sure you probably have known people like that, that just cannot stop a conversation, or they don't do very well with boundaries

around certain topics. And if they don't get feedback when they're younger, the adult world kind of lets people go, unless it's like in a job situation where you're like, that's inappropriate now. So most of the feedback I get from people that have had developmental trauma or experiences during childhood and youth,

developmental trauma or experiences during childhood and youth, they have a subjective feeling of distress in certain situations, right? They can have anxieties or they find they might have a panic attack and they may not connect it to anything in their past. So there's both that subjective sensation of, I feel distress, which will bring them sometimes into the mental health community and they'll ask for help. But a lot of times, I would say the vast majority of people who have trauma-related kind of alterations in the way they function,

don't ever see a mental health professional. And a lot of them have developed some, I mean, not that I wanna be a complete, you know, I won't go into politics, but think about this, a lot of people that are at work environments, whose pathological adaptive behaviors, some of which are very antisocial, and you know, they don't tell the truth, they learn how to manipulate people, they learn how to crawl over people, a lot of these people rise to positions of significant influence in organizations. And they're so unaware, self unaware, that they're basically acting on a lot of

their trauma stuff in their little power games they play with people all the time. So anybody who's been in a corporate environment and learns about this, they begin to identify that. So. Let's keep going on the theme of, you know, what can we do? You talk in your book, Bruce, about the value of controllable, predictable, and moderate challenge. Right. Yep. So I was talking about the malleability, the plasticity of the stress response systems, that when those systems are activated in extreme ways

or uncontrollable ways, the kinds we've been talking about that are traumatic, they get overactive and overly reactive. But if you have an opportunity to have stretch assignments or little challenges where you leave your comfort zone and you're able to have some control over when you do it, how you do it. The experiences are moderately challenging. What happens is over time you actually develop resilience and it can contribute to healing if you have a trauma-related sensitization.

But this is really kind of what, kind of what competition does in sport. This is what performance does in the performing arts. This is what you're putting together an art show for an artist is. There's this controllable but stressful challenge that you go take the challenge and you grow from it. That's how we grow. And an easy way to do that, I think, for a lot of people

is to travel. I think traveling is one of those, you know, Anthony Bourdain talked about it all the time. It literally is resilience building to kind of be uncomfortable in a new place. Because there's controllability to it to a certain degree. And it's moderate. But you grow.

You grow inside. And I think that you can do that in a lot of things. I mean, but you grow, you grow inside. And I think that you can do that in a lot of things. I mean, if you get old like me, you can decide to take up tap dancing or some other thing like that. And you get better by being worse. You got to be bad at something. And if you're willing to be bad at something, you'll build resilience. But you've got to be willing to kind of be uncomfortable. And see that again, adult life, we've constructed adult life to protect us from discomfort. And

so that means that you have to be the kind of person that has sort of a growth mindset that I'm actually going to intentionally Do something that takes more energy more effort, you know, it's gonna make me feel uncomfortable I'm gonna look like a fool But if you do that, you'll keep growing if you don't if you just say I'm gonna I'm only gonna do what I'm good at And I'm gonna do that all the time in the same way every Thursday night It's gonna be the same thing, You know after a while you just you know You don't grow so

The other thing I'd say Dan that you know for practical Sort of stuff that helps people about I think these simplest most actionable simplest, most actionable, most effective thing that people can do if they have any kind of anxiety, sadness, depression, demoralization, trauma related stuff in their history is to think about intentionally walking in nature as much as you can. Now if you're in an urban area, maybe you pick a park, maybe walk along the river, but the sounds and the somatosensory elements of the natural world actually do something to our bodies that is positive. And walking is one of those very easy, wonderful things you can do.

And the beauty of it is you can dose it. So you can dose it. So if you can only walk for 10 minutes, take a little 10-minute walk. Walk out of your office building, take a 10-minute walk, get some coffee, come back. You can do that three or four times a day. And you don't always have to have a big walk. And to your brain, these little smaller doses are actually really, really helpful.

What about for children? What would your number one recommendation be there? Asking for a friend with a very anxious child. No, I honestly, I think that movement is like so undervalued in our modern educational system. If any way that you can get the educators in that child's life to begin to build in sensory regulatory breaks that allow the child, if they are a mover, you know, some kids are not movers, some kids like to regulate in smaller spaces and do their art or, you know, use some other thing. But if the child's a mover, walking, dancing, music, both performing music and listening to music, all of that stuff,

appropriately dosed can really help. The problem with a lot of schools will say, oh, we do music or we do resport or we do whatever. What you find is they make you sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit an hour of moving as opposed to sit for 20 minutes, move for five minutes, sit for 15 minutes, move for five minutes. And it's that dosing that really helps somebody stay regulated during the day. So if a child says their favorite part of school is recess, that's not necessarily because they just want to play and don't want to learn, like it's actually serving a therapeutic purpose. Two really important purposes. One is that the two big ways that human beings regulate is by

moving and there's some amount of sense for things. And the other one is by connecting, by being with your buds, with other people. And so those are both really healthy things. I mean, the feedback, you know, when kids love recess, I'm like, that's a healthy kid. That's gonna be, you know, that's what I love. They love recess. They still do. What about if this kid, when you ask him

what he wants to do when he grows up, says criminal? Is that healthy? That's not the same friend. Depends on the kind of criminal. I want to go back to a phrase that I mentioned before, and it's in your book, Rupture and Repair. What does that mean, and is that something we can work on training?

Absolutely. Well, you can work on recognizing it, and you can work on the repair part. The rupture part, here's the idea here. And remember how I mentioned that you can have these moments when you're like fully present with somebody and they feel it, you feel it. But the truth is you can't stay there. You just, it's impossible. And so you disconnect. So even if you have a baby and you love your baby and you're gazing at them, you're the most wonderful thing in the world and you're staring at the baby, the baby looks at you for a while and then that's like it gets too emotionally, it gets too intense.

And so what does the baby do? They close their eyes and they turn away. They literally will turn away from you. But there's a rhythm to it. Then they want to come back and have another gaze and then they turn away. And there's this natural relational rhythm to that breaking and sort of connection and then reconnection. And so that the first thing is that I think it's important we all recognize that the nature of human connection, probably should we should call it human

disconnection, because we spend call it human disconnection, because we spend more time trying to repair and reconnect than we do in connection. I mean, think about the people you know the most and you love the most, right? You've known them for years and years and years, and you may live with them and you may be married to them. And think about how often you say, that's not what I meant. This is what I was trying to say. And And think about how often you say, that's not what I meant. And this is what I was trying to say. And that's if you're still trying. And so it's very hard to stay in connection.

But people need to hear that's okay. That's fine. Human beings are meant to connect and reconnect. And the beauty is that that pattern I talked about earlier about moderate, controllable doses of stress, that's the rhythm that you create over the day if you're with somebody that you're having a positive rupture and repair with, right? You'll sit down, you'll kind of connect about something and then something will disrupt

it. Phone call, work, kid, argument, whatever. Then you come back in, reconnect, we're good, just a little thing, we're good, we're fine, sorry, and then go away, come back, go away, come back. And the thing is the connection gets stronger with the repetitions. It doesn't get stronger with staying in connection. It's like you get, think about the difference between playing the piano. If you play the piano, it makes music if you tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

If you just put your finger down and tapped it, it's not like an organ where it keeps making noise, it stops making noise. It stops making noise. That's what relationships are like. Relationships are like a piano. They're not like an organ. But even though we are relational by nature, that doesn't necessarily mean we know how to be connected. And that is the default, right? If we're talking about the small doses or the rupture and repair, it's assuming that there's a baseline understanding of how to connect. And I guess the question would be, how do we learn that? Especially

if you come from a chaotic home where connection is unsafe, feels unsafe, I should say. Perfect. Great question. So the key thing you're pointing out, Bianca, is that that whole connection and reconnecting, everybody's working from their own worldview. And so if you grew up in an environment, let's say you had like great ideal parents present, attentive attune, did everything for you when you're little and your brain builds this catalog and goes, oh, human beings are awesome. And now I fall in love with some human being and this tone of voice means I love you and this kind of form of touch means this and all that other stuff. And that should be the light. You think that that's what they are understanding, but they've come from a completely different world where when somebody gets physically

close to me, they're just as likely to hit me as they are to hug me. So I'm like, I'm not really comfortable with that physical proximity unless I initiated and I'm in control of it. And the minute it has raised your voice a little bit out of frustration, even about of excitement, that's like, that's too reminiscent of, and so I'm backing out. And so the key is you got to, but this is kind of where what happened to you is important in a relationship. So if you realize that your partner's coming from a background where, wow,

physical intimacy was like scary at times for this person. So then you don't just come up behind them and give them a hug of affection all the time because you're expecting, oh, this is kind of cute. I mean, I'm loving and they may go, what the fuck? What are you doing? And you're like, I'm just trying to be affectionate. What's wrong with you? And then it starts off in a little rupture and because you don't understand each other. So your point, you're absolutely right. This is where you kind of, if you know these things, you can kind of sit down and go, you know, let's talk about this. You know, I come from a background where, you know, if you use your hands in

communication, that was appropriate. I mean, I'll never forget this story. And this is sort of a tangent, but I was first learning about these concepts and I had a, I grew up in North Dakota, a lot of Lutheran Norwegians in North Dakota. They are not very emotionally expressive at all. And in fact, I had a friend, I probably said like 80 words to him his whole senior year, still one of my best friends. We didn't expect any words.

He just nodded every once in a while. Things were good. All right. So he goes away to college, falls in love with a woman from New York who is Italian, and he goes to their house for Thanksgiving. And you can imagine Italian Thanksgiving, hands and raised voices. I went to his house once when I was a senior in high school, eight brothers and sisters around the table. Nobody said anything at the dinner. Nothing. All I heard was clinking, cutting, and I was so nervous. I didn't even want to ask to pass the butter or anything for this baked potato that was

like, so I ate this baked potato with nothing on it just because I didn't want to be the only one that talked. Anyway, so he goes to that Thanksgiving, comes back, they're sitting in front of me, he's here, she's there. And I said, how was the break? And he got pale and went, oh my God. And she goes, oh, it was great. And he said, oh, the fighting. She said, fighting? What fighting?

What are you talking about fighting? What fight did you have? I didn't see one fight. I love that. And so I realized, wow, that's a whole different, two different worldviews about the same thing. But that's to your point. I mean, if you don't kind of get to know somebody,

then you're a lot of times making well-intended mistakes about what's funny or what isn't funny or what's an acceptable form of touch and what isn't. And then that requires really an interest in what happened to you. Absolutely, that's exactly right. Because in that kind of unsafe place, if you ask the question, what's wrong with you,

you only retreat more. Absolutely, and that's exactly right. And that's what happens, Bianca. Are you talking to Dr. Bruce or you're talking to me now, Bianca? I don't know you. Your thing about North Dakota reminded me, Bianca and our son and I, we love Parks and Rec, Thank you. Your thing about North Dakota reminded me, Bianca and our son and I, we love Parks and

Rec, the TV show. And there's a character, Ron Swanson, who's this like manly man and doesn't like talking about his emotions. And he has this whole spiel about how he worked with a guy for years and they never even exchanged names and he says, best friend I ever had. We still never talk sometimes. I have to, I laugh because my, my daughters that tease me that I'm like Ron Swanson. There's another great scene with him where he's in with a doctor and the doctor says to Ron, do you have any history of mental illness in the family?

And he says, I have an uncle who does yoga. That's pretty nice. Sounds like my dad. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and any other resources you've put out into the world website, anything? The name of the book is What Happened to You, written with Oprah Winfrey. And there's another book that's kind of maybe helpful called The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog that I wrote with Maya Salavitz.

They both are kind of at the voice of the people in the general audience would, would be able to read without too much trouble. So those are good starting places. Do you have a website? Yeah, I do. If you just go to bdperry.com, there are some links to articles and other things. Okay, well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes for this episode. Dr. Perry, a total pleasure. Thank you for doing this. Bianca, great job. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for making it happen. My pleasure. And thanks for having this, Bianca. Great job. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for making it happen. My pleasure.

And thanks for having me and keep up the good work. Likewise. Likewise. Thanks again to Dr. Bruce Perry. Really appreciate him coming on. We have dropped some links in the show notes to previous episodes that are related to the content of this episode, including a link to an interview I did with Barbara Fredrickson

about micro interactions and a couple of incredible episodes that go right to the issue of trauma, one with Stephanie Fu and one with her therapist Dr. Jacob Hamm. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. We get additional production support from Colin Lester Fleming, Isabel Hibbard, Carolyn Keenan and Wan Bo Wu. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production.

DJ Kashmir is our managing producer and Nick Thorburn of the Van Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.