Glenbard Parent Series: 2023-10-08

Thursday, October 12, 2023

GPS Dr. Bruce Perry joins to discuss trauma, resilience and healing

On Oct 11, 2023, the Glenbard Parent Series hosted child psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry MD in a program based on his bestseller “What Happened to You: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing”.

Many people have likely asked themselves, "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't they just control their behavior?" When questioning emotions and behavior, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves or hold ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard.

Perry offered a groundbreaking shift from asking, “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” This puts the focus on having compassion for other people and ourselves. It’s a subtle but profound shift in an approach to trauma. It also allows an individual to understand their past in order to clear a path to their future, opening the door to resilience and healing. With these powerful insights, individuals can strengthen their self-worth and change their lives.

Perry is the principal of the Neurosequential Network and a professor in the department of psychiatry at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of "The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog," a bestseller based on his work with maltreated children, and "Born For Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered." Perry's most recent book, "What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing” was co-authored with Oprah Winfrey and released in 2021.

Check out MEDspiration Podcast with Bruce Perry, M.D., Ph.D. | What Happened to You? | Using Neuroscience to Cultivate Resilience VIDEO HERE

Take-Aways

Glenbard Assistant Director for Teaching and Learning Mike Fumagalli co-hosted the event and shared the following takeaways:

Emotional regulation is the prerequisite to learning and productive communication. The cerebral cortex, where all thinking and processing takes place, is unavailable if a child is dysregulated and under duress in any way. Helping a child to regulate themselves is central to making their brain available for learning.
Even a fully-regulated brain only processes and absorbs 85% of the information being presented. This means that under the most optimal conditions when a person is fully regulated, their brain still will not absorb and process 100% of the information. Conversely, a dysregulated brain only will process and absorb 10% of the information and require 4 times the repetition in order to accurately consume and apply that information.
Neuroscience has taught us a great deal about how the brain functions when communicating with others. Emotional contagion is the idea that an emotionally dysregulated individual will project dysregulation onto others. This means that only an emotionally regulated person is capable of calming and communicating with a dysregulated one. In order for us to have the most optimal outcomes when working with others, we must be emotionally regulated. Ways we can promote emotional regulation are repetitive, patterned, somatosensory experiences - walking, riding a bike, swimming, listening to music at 60-80 beats per minute, drawing, knitting, etc. This is why these things can calm a highly stimulated parasympathetic nervous system. A common goal for everyone is to have strategies for establishing emotional regulation and equilibrium, especially if others around us are experiencing something different.