How To Regulate Your Nervous System: Anxiety, Relationships, and the Baggage You Didn't Ask For | Dr. Bruce Perry

29:44But 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 adult life.

30:34Many cultures have these very, very well-established, centuries-long heritages of putting these practices together. And I believe that a lot of them have 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's 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 really sort of have poverty relationships.

31:28If 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.

31:39So 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 we think 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.

32:28It 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 know, 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.

33:12And I think that the more people understand these things, the more we develop, sort of 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, the way our stress response systems work, the fact that 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 want to 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.

33:58But it's about threat. You know, fear is 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, I think the less vulnerable we will be to fear-mongering 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.

34:31Coming 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 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.

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38:35It 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.

39:21So 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, very useful for people without that clinical diagnosis.

40:13And 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 want to figure out? Yeah, absolutely. So EMDR stands for eye movement and desensitization and reprocessing. it's a therapeutic technique that involves, originally involved moving your eyes from one side to the next and tracking, looking to the side and looking the other side, back and forth and back and forth in a certain rhythm while you were thinking about the traumatic event.

41:15And 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.

42:20And 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 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.

43:20And it's so that the association between pattern repetitive rhythmic stuff as being a way to kind of calm us and regulate us is in 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 the kinds of stuff. But that simple piece of information, I think everybody can connect it when they start thinking about their own life, right?

44:08I 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 needlework. 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.

44:51And 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 them to an elder, and they do traditional drumming.

45:41And it's the same, to me, it's kind 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.

46:32So literally, 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.

47:18Because when you do pattern repetitive rhythmic activity, you're activating a much more powerful memory that was built into your brain in 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.

48:15And 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.

49:09And 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 be exactly, 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.

49:52I 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?

50:47And 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. Yeah. I think the beauty of getting older is that hopefully we all are walking around in a fucking fog.

51:38I mean, I hate to say it, but sorry. No, no, that's what we love talking like that. That's his love language. Yeah, exactly. The more fucks, the better. We have this fantasy that everybody's life is somehow better. And 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 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.

52:30I 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, you know, 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 do 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.

53:11And 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 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. 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 yes because he's like he recognized it like if i really got to know him then i wouldn't yeah just like you said dan i wouldn't i wouldn't dislike him as much well that's the root to another lincoln phrase malice toward none right i mean that that's how you get there i think i'm not saying I'm there, but I do think that's the path.

54:21Coming 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.

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57:18I 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, and 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.

57:56or I have to be consistent and like, oh, I got to do MDR. I got to walk every day or 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. 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.

58:47But 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 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 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.

59:32Just 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.

1:00:24So 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 it's the little conversations when you're walking on the street 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.

1:01:05And 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 strength, not just in the sort of post-traumatic wisdom category where you've learned from it.

1:01:49But 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, you know, 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.

1:02:40not 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 drive people crazy 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 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.

1:03:43Is 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 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 nearly not the best shot.

1:04:24And 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, go home, go home. Finally, I'm okay, I'm leaving. and I'm turning the light, lock the door when you leave. The people that don't learn how to read nonverbal cues, we try subtly to teach them.

1:05:04But 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, they have a subjective feeling of distress in certain situations, right? They could have anxieties or they find they might have a panic attack and they may not connect it to anything in their past.

1:05:54So there's both that subjective sensitive 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 want to be a complete, you know, I won't go to 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.

1:06:35They 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. Let's keep going on the theme of 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.

1:07:26But 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 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.

1:08:15That'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, you know, 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, if you get old like me, you can decide to take up tap dancing or some other thing like that. And, you know, you get better by being worse. You know, you got to be bad at something.

1:08:55And 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 going to make me feel uncomfortable. I'm going to look like a fool. But if you do that, you'll keep growing. If you don't, if you just say, I'm only going to do what I'm good at, and I'm going to do that all the time in the same way, every Thursday night, It's going to be the same thing.

1:09:39After a while, you just don't grow.

1:09:47The other thing I'd say, Dan, for practical sort of stuff that helps people, I think the 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 you 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.

1:10:40And 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, honestly, I think that movement is 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.

1:11:32Some 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 that with a lot of schools will say, oh, we do music or we do re-sport or we do whatever. What you find is they make you sit, 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.

1:12:15So 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, you know, the somatic sensory 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 going to be you know that's what i that's what i loved i love recess what about this 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 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 is 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.

1:13:19The 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 intense. It gets too intense. And so what does the baby do? They close their eye and they turn away. They literally will turn away from you.

1:13:52But 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 the first thing is that I think it's important. we all recognize that the nature of human connection, probably we should 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.

1:14:34And think about how often you say, that's not what I meant. 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 that positive rupture and repair with, right? You'll sit down, you'll kind of connect about something, and then something will disrupt it.

1:15:19Phone 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. 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 think about the difference between playing the piano if you play the piano it makes music if you 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, stops making noise. It stops making noise. That's what relationships are like. Relationships are like a piano.

1:16:09They'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 reconnect, everybody's working from their own worldview.

1:16:50And so if you grew up in an environment, let's say you had the great ideal parents, present, attentive, attuned, 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.

1:17:24So I'm like, I'm not really comfortable with that physical proximity unless I initiate it and I'm in control of it. And the minute it has, you raise your voice a little bit out of frustration, even a bit of excitement, that's like, that's too reminiscent of, and so I'm backing out. And so the key is you got to, 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 you know 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 because you don't understand each other.

1:18:14So 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 used 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 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.

1:18:56Still 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's 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 are on the table. Nobody said anything at the dinner table, nothing. All I heard was clinking, cutting, and I was so nervous. I didn't didn't want to ask to pass the butter or anything for this baked potato that was like, ugh.

1:19:40So 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.

1:20:10I love that. And so I realized, wow, there's a whole different, two different worldviews about the same thing. But that's to your point. I mean, that's, 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. 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.

1:20:51Bruce or you're talking to me now, Bianca? I don't know you.

1:20:59your 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 laugh because 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.

1:21:40That's pretty funny. 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 Salovitz. They both are kind of at the voice of the people in the general audience 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.

1:22:29Okay. 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 me and keep up the good work. Likewise.

1:22:54Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before I let you go here. Starting Sunday, July 12th at 4 p.m. Eastern, the Summer Sunday Live series premieres. Join legendary teacher Sharon Salzberg for an eight week deep dive into the Buddha's cookbook for human happiness, The Eightfold Path.

1:23:31You'll experience live meditation and Q &A only on the 10 % with Dan Harris app. Go to danharris.com to start your free trial today.

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