The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: How Childhood Trauma Affects Us
The year is 1980; Texas, USA. Despite how far we have progressed as a society and the numerous advancements we have made in the medical field, "researchers didn't pay much attention to the lasting damage that psychological trauma can produce." In fact many researchers operated on a belief so prevalent that, no matter where you were born, you have probably heard it yourself: That children are simply "'naturally resilient', born with an innate ability to 'bounce back.'" The belief that, children could experience unimaginable horrors, and still come out on the other side, unscathed!
However, despite how prominent this belief was at the time, there was one psychiatrist who wouldn't jump on that bandwagon. Even as a young researcher, Dr. Perry was able to "observe in the lab that stressful experiences--particularly in early life--could change the brains of young animals. ... I thought: why wouldn't the same be true for humans? "
Dr. Perry was already noting this in his work with troubled children, for "the vast majority of his patients had lives filled with chaos, neglect, or violence." He was even noticing that many of these children were exhibiting symptoms of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), a condition that most notably affects soldiers who have returned from war after experiencing unspeakable things. Researchers were recognizing the lasting effect trauma had on adults, yet despite this, most people still chose to assume that, children must simply be built different!
"It is the rare child who escapes trauma entirely."
(All images were created using an AI generator on Night Cafe)
This sentence becomes truly concerning when we take into account that "40% of American children will have at least one potentially traumatizing experience by age 18." These statistics are just for America, never mind the rest of the world. A traumatizing experience can include the death of a loved one, frequent and continuous abuse, sexual assault or rape, witnessing or experiencing a serious accident, violent crime, etc. "In 2004 alone, an estimated 3 million official reports of child abuse were made to child protection agencies," which, once again, is even more terrifying when we take into account that these are only reported cases--how many more go unreported?
Then there are the statistics of the long-lasting aftereffects of trauma; "more than 8 million American children suffer from serious psychiatric problems. ... Nearly one third of children who are abused will have some clear psychological problems as a result." Obviously children are not as "resilient" as some once believed them to be--children are human, too.
"Ultimately what determines how children survive trauma, is whether the people around them stand by these children with love, support, and encouragement." This will be especially important when determining "why some people grow up to be productive, responsible, kind human beings, whereas others respond to abuse by inflicting it onto others."
Dr. Perry's first child patient was a 7-year-old girl named Tina, "a 3 foot tall African-American girl with meticulously neat braids."
Upon his first meeting with Tina, the two sat together in his office before she eventually walked across the room and into his lap. She then attempted to pull down his zipper.
Tina was at the University of Chicago child psychiatry clinic because her school teachers wanted her to be evaluated; "she had been 'aggressive and inappropriate' with her classmates. She'd exposed herself, attacked other children, and tried to engage them in sexual play." Looking into her medical chart, Dr. Perry discovered that, from the ages of 4 to 6, Tina and her brother had been sexually molested by a neighborhood babysitter. Tina was being raised by a poor, single mother who worked long hours and could not afford to give her children the proper love and attention that they needed, let alone a decent babysitter...
"Here. Let's go color."
Dr. Perry took it upon himself to initiate the meeting by coloring with the little girl. The way he saw it, all of Tina's relationships with boys and men had been misguided. "She had only known men as sexual predators. ... Experience had taught her that men wanted sex, either from her or her mother. ... How do you change beliefs, locked into place from years of experience, with only one hour of therapy a week?"
Because of his own inexperience in the field, Dr. Perry decided to confide with some colleagues. He presented Tina's case to a psychoanalyst named Dr. Stine, a very practical man who preferred looking at the scientific aspect of trauma as opposed to the human aspect. Dr. Stine informed him, "Tina meets the diagnostic criteria for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)," and left it at that.
Not completely satisfied with his colleagues conclusion, Dr. Perry decided to get one more opinion. This time he turned to Dr. Dyrud, "a wise and wonderful man, a true giant in the field of psychiatry. ... He had years of real life experience, and he let that experience, not just theories, mold his perspective."
"Tell me about Tina," Dr. Dyrud inquired, but Dr. Perry quickly realized he did not know a whole lot about this little girl. So, he decided to learn a bit more about Tina's life.
Again, Tina was being raised by her single mother, Sara, who was taking care of 3 young children by herself. After working a full-time job, the duty of then coming straight home to do chores and take care of her children, left her exhausted, overwhelmed, and demoralized. It reached a point where Tina started showing up late for her therapy sessions, and some began to suspect that it was a sign of resistance.
One snowy Chicago evening (which means brutally cold), as Dr. Perry was leaving the clinic, he discovered Tina and her family waiting for the bus. "Sara was holding the baby, and Tina sat next to her brother on a bench, under the heat lamp of the bus stop." The family couldn't see Dr. Perry; he stayed out of view, for he knew that "the field of psychiatry is very attentive to boundaries." But once again, on another chilly, snowy night, Dr. Perry found the family waiting for the bus. This time, he offered them a ride, and after some persuasion, Sara accepted.
"When we arrived at her building, I watched as Sara struggled to get out of the car and walk through the unshoveled snow, juggling the baby, her purse, and a bag of groceries. Tina tried to carry the other bag, but it was too heavy for her, and she slipped in the snow." Dr. Perry offered his assistance again, and helped the family into their apartment. The experience gave him a lot of insight into Tina's life...
Now knowing a bit more about the young girl's life, Dr. Perry began to stew on the issue, how everything had come together to make Tina's behavior--her brain--what it was. "After all, the human brain is the organ that mediates all emotion, thought, and behavior. ... It is responsible for thousands of complex functions!" His work began to focus on the stress-response systems of the brain, how they are affected by trauma, and how it in turn affects other areas of the organ. "These systems are among only a handful of nervous systems in the brain that, if poorly regulated or abnormal, can cause dysfunction in all of the main brain areas." Dr. Perry started to connect that "the threats and painful sexual assaults that Tina experienced had resulted in repetitive and intense activation of her stress-response systems." Long story short, Tina's systems learned to tolerate the abuse.
Over the 3 years that Dr. Perry worked with Tina, there were periods of great progress! Unfortunately, it ultimately ended with a then-10-year-old Tina "performing fellatio on an older boy at school. What I'd taught her, it seemed, was not to change her behaviour, but to better hide her sexual activities from adults. On the surface, she could make others think she was behaving appropriately, but inside, she had not overcome her trauma."
Back to square one... Although Dr. Perry had been right about Tina's stress-response systems (and they did improve to an extent), her most troubling problem was her distorted view of sexuality. "I began to think that memory was what I needed to understand before I could do better."
"Memory is the capacity to carry forward in time some element of an experience. ... It composes us and allows our past to help determine our future." Dr. Perry went back to the brain's usage of patterns and repetitions, how our brains can make associations between two things, given enough time. For example, after hearing the sound of sirens often enough, our brains will automatically begin to associate them with emergency vehicles--so much so, that we can begin to visualize the firetruck etc. without needing to see it. Obviously Tina's memory, and the repeated patterns that created her brain's association of men = sex , would help explain a lot of her behaviors.
"Nervous systems have evolved to be especially sensitive to novelty, since new experiences usually signal danger, or opportunity. What this also means, is that early experiences will have a far greater impact than later ones." Because of Tina's early sexual experiences with men, her brain had created a template of those patterns and associations. Of course she assumed that Dr. Perry, a man, would want sex from her; her brain did not know any differently.
Although it didn't go "perfectly," Tina was Dr. Perry's first patient; there would be many future cases to learn and grow from. For example, Sandy...
It was 1990 when Dr. Perry was approached by an attorney in Illinois. "A 3-year-old girl named Sandy had witnessed the murder of her own mother. Now, almost a year later, the prosecution wanted her to testify about it." What was more, Sandy had yet to see a therapist about the traumatic event, and lived with a foster family who knew nothing about the crime due to the Witness Protection Program. Sandy not only knew her mother's killer, but she had helped identify him to police. Because the killer was affiliated with a gang, a hit was put out on the girl.
"So let me go over this again. A 3-year-old girl witnesses her mother being raped and murdered. The girl has her own throat cut, twice, and is left for dead. She is alone with her dead mother's body for eleven hours. ... Her CPS caseworker doesn't think she needs to see a mental health professional. For 9 months this child is moved from foster home to foster home with no professional help, and her experience is never shared with her families because she is in hiding."
Before meeting Sandy, Dr. Perry took the chance to look at her history. "She had episodic periods of daydreaming, during which it was extremely difficult to get her to 'snap out of it.' ... I also learned that Sandy sometimes had aggressive tantrums. ... She didn't want to use silverware, but she also refused to drink milk, or even look at milk cartons. When the doorbell rang, she would hide like a skittish cat." He noticed that, given her skittish, startled reactions, Sandy's stress-response systems had been sensitized.
You may have heard of such terms yourself: sensitization and tolerance. In sensitized systems, "a pattern of stimulus leads to increased sensitivity to future similar stimulus. Even small stress factors can provoke large responses." This was like Sandy with the doorbell. "Tolerance, on the contrary, mutes one's response to an experience over time." If we didn't build up a tolerance, even mundane experiences would appear new and overwhelming every time! This was Tina's way of coping with her frequent sexual abuse.
"I first met Sandy in a small room housed in a typical, sterile government building. ... When I walked in, Sandy was sitting on the floor with some dolls around her. She was coloring."
Dr. Perry took it upon himself to initiate conversation, but he did so in a very controlled manner. If Sandy's system was sensitized, he didn't want to make her uncomfortable. "Eventually, Sandy decided to move a bit closer to me and silently directed me to use a specific color."
But then Dr. Perry took her back to the night of the tragedy: "What happened to your neck?"
Sandy froze; she stopped coloring. "Sandy stood up, grabbed a stuffed rabbit, held it by the ears, and slashed at its neck with the crayon. As she slashed, she repeated, 'For your own good, dude.'" Suddenly she dropped the toy to the ground, climbed atop the radiator and jumped off, over and over again. Sandy was experiencing one of her tantrums. Dr. Perry caught her during one of her jumps, and she began telling him the whole story...
Sandy was obviously extremely traumatized from the crime. "Her symptoms were merely defenses, constructed by her brain to keep the trauma at bay." Her brain was interpreting the incoming signals of mundane things (drinking milk, the doorbell, etc.) as signs of danger. "Her brain was trying to protect her based upon what it had previously learned." However, because of this, her brain and body were living in a continuous state of fear.
When our brains first receive these signals, they are filtered by the lowest, most primitive area of our brains. This area is only concerned with identifying threats. "It's important to understand that our default is set to suspicion, not acceptance. ... Since humans have always been the deadliest animal encountered by other humans, we closely monitor nonverbal signals and body language."
Once the brain has calibrated the degree of danger, "the threat systems continue to integrate incoming information and orchestrate a total body response aimed at keeping you alive." This is often done through the means of fight or flight ; however, when a danger is deemed too overwhelming, the brain can respond with disassociation.
"Disassociation is a very primitive reaction. ... Sometimes our only response to being attacked or hurt, is essentially to curl up, make ourselves as small as possible, to cry for help and hope for a miracle." During this state, the brain focuses on surviving. It releases painkillers-- opiods --as it prepares the body for injury. The person turns completely inward and disconnects from reality. If the person begins to associate stress with dissociating, "the result is that these systems can become sensitized, leading to numerous emotional, behavioral, and cognitive problems long after the traumatic event is over."
As someone who used dissociation to cope with my abuse, I can absolutely attest to this. I grew up in very turbulent environments: from divorced parents, to my father and sister always yelling, to being sexually abused by my grandfather, to an abusive stepfather--the list goes on. As such, I would often cope by focusing on something else and "zoning out." It was useful in the moment, but now that I am older, I live in a constant state of anxiety, I do not know how to healthily deal with stressful situations, or regulate my emotions...
The second time Dr. Perry met with Sandy, she again did something strange. This time, she made the doctor lay face down on the floor before wandering around the room, bringing him toy food to "eat." He allowed her to have total control.
"After all, one of the defining elements of a traumatic experience ... is complete loss of control. ... Recovery from trauma requires the victim to return to a situation that is safe and predictable." This is what Sandy was doing with her imagined play. She was allowing herself to return to an extremely stressful event, but in small doses, so that her brain could eventually make it more mundane. She was teaching herself tolerance.
Finally, after many months of therapy, Sandy led their play to something else. "She took my hand and led me to a rocking chair instead. 'Read me a story,' she said. Thereafter, Sandy sat in my lap, and we rocked and read books."
While the cases thus far have been very upsetting, Dr. Perry also had cases of children involved in the justice system.
Leon was an 18-year-old man being held in a maximum-security prison, but at the time of his crime, he was 16. He had encountered 2 teenage girls in his apartment building and tried propositioning them for sex. When they refused, he murdered and raped both of them. Even more baffling, his medical history offered no insight into his mind. He came from two well-adjusted, hardworking parents. There were no signs of abuse. "Yet he was a master at manipulating people, and he was completely devoid of emotional connections to others."
During this time, again it was a common belief that some people were just "born bad," that some people were more genetically inclined to be killers. However, Leon had an older brother, Frank, who was the exact opposite of Leon. He was employed, a successful plumber, married with 2 children, and a respected member of his community. So what had been so vastly different between the two?...
Dr. Perry met with Leon's parents and brother. He learned that, during Frank's childhood, Marie was a stay-at-home mom, surrounded by extended family. Baby Frank was always given endless love and attention. However, by the time Leon arrived, the family had to move to an impoverished neighborhood, "plagued with high rates of violent crime and drug use." Alan worked long hours, and Marie no longer had her family; she was completely alone with raising Leon.
Young and inexperienced, Marie, with son Frank, would go out for walks, leaving a then-4-week-old Leon alone in the apartment for hours. For months, baby Leon sat in a dark apartment, crying, with no one to comfort him and nothing to stimulate his senses. As such, his brain was never given the opportunity to develop normally.
During a normal infancy, baby and parent bond through the parent being able to meet baby's needs. With this loving and attentive care, baby learns to associate human interactions with "reward"--baby's caregivers eases his distress, and baby associates humans = relief. While it is true that brain development is most crucial during the earliest years of life, it is even more so for the fact that our earliest relationships will serve as the template for all future ones. "If this sensitive period is missed, some systems may never be able to reach their full potential. In some cases, the deficit may be permanent."
There are even nerve cells known as mirror neurons, that react to and mimic human behaviour. This can easily be observed when a mother smiles and her baby smiles in response. Here, empathy and healthy relationships can originate. But if a baby, like Leon, is left to cry alone and is rarely given human contact, he cannot make the positive associations with contact because he is never given the opportunity to do so.
Leon's family immediately noticed the effects of the neglect. He did not respond to parenting the same way that Frank did. When Leon misbehaved, he appeared unbothered, and didn't try to correct the behavior. He felt no happiness when he received positive reinforcement either. "Leon had been deprived of the critical stimuli necessary to develop the brain areas that modulate stress, and link comfort with human company." Any time he cried, his distress was never relieved; his stress system was constantly on high alert. Because of this, he could not understand relationships, and learned that the only person he could rely on, was himself. In retrospect, the neglect, on top of the poor choices that were continuously made throughout Leon's life, are what made him a sociopath.
The final case is about a 6-year-old James, "who reminded Dr. Perry how important it is to listen, paying close attention to the children themselves."
"James was referred to us by a judge who had received so many different opinions about the boy's situation." His adoptive parents simply deemed him "out of control." Child protection agencies believed his parents just needed a rest period from James' behavior. Teachers and medical professionals found unexplained cuts and bruises on his body, and suspected he was being abused.
"According to his mother, Merle, James was incorrigible and uncontrollable." He frequently ran away from home. He had already been hospitalized numerous times, "once after jumping from a second story balcony." He lied constantly, was prescribed antidepressants, and had seen dozens of therapists, etc. "The last straw was an overdose of medication he'd taken that had landed him in an intensive care unit."
Perhaps some kind of emotional disorder could explain James' symptoms, but while looking further into his case, Dr. Perry noted something odd... "When he was in the hospital, he was well-behaved. He didn't try to run away. His behaviour in school did not match his mother's descriptions either." Dr. Perry also noticed that James' parents were acting strange, particularly Merle, who seemed entirely focused and concerned with herself, not her son.
The final warning sign was when James had regained consciousness in the hospital, and while his mother wasn't present, he informed the staff, "Mom is lying. Mom is hurting me. Please call the police."
Suddenly everything began to make sense. James was not running away to be rebellious, but because his mother was abusing him. He hadn't jumped from the balcony, or out of moving cars; his mother had pushed him. Even the overdose had been forced upon him by Merle. "And James refused to give up, despite being disregarded, ignored, disbelieved, and even punished for telling the truth."
As it would turn out, Merle would be the one to have a condition known as Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy (MSBP). Patients with this condition "deliberately try to make another person sick, in a ploy for attention and support." These people have an unhealthy desire to be needed, and to portray to others the image of nurturer. This deception can prove extremely dangerous, for many succeed in killing several children before they are finally caught. In fact, in one study 39 mothers with MSBP were recorded without them knowing. "Some tampered with their children's life support machines, others smothered their babies, and one even forced her fingers down her infant's throat." As is usually the case, many individuals with this condition have suffered childhood trauma--often severe neglect, exhibiting how the cycle of abuse continues to go on, in turn affecting the next generation.
In the end, Dr. Perry and his team took their findings to the judge, "and on an emergency basis, removed James and his siblings from the custody of Merle. A civil jury agreed that James had been abused." Their parental rights were terminated, and charges were also filed against them.
Again, having been a victim of abuse myself, especially sexual abuse at the hand of a family member, when I came forward about the abuse, very few family believed me... I was never given the support I needed, and in an extreme case, my own mother terminated contact with me. Despite being treated as a social pariah, I continued to stand by my story, and eventually found a community full of similar survivors. With enough time, even my mother started to support me.
This is what Dr. Perry claims is the most important factor with any case of trauma, and that is the relationships that we have with others, and their actions and reactions to our trauma. We discussed the importance of brain development and exploring human relationships during the early years of life, but more so than that, brains need structure, stability, safety, and guidance. We need to know that we are allowed to grow and thrive.
Of course, no matter how much work we put into ourselves and our environments, we still cannot account for everything. As we discussed, 40% of American children will encounter at least one traumatic experience in their childhood. We cannot foresee the future, but we can decide how we will react in the face of trauma. Children--the brain--learn by example. If they are surrounded by people who can control their emotions, act calmly in the face of danger, cope with stress in a healthy manner, then children can mimic and learn to do the same.
This primary research of this book was done in the 1980s, and although we have come a long way as a society, it is still far from perfect. Although we have learned to practice more empathy and understanding, now it has reached a point where that understanding no longer holds people, especially children, accountable for their actions. We are also witnessing the effects that social media is having on malleable brains, with an uprise of things like antisocial behaviour, narcissism, and needing validation from strangers as opposed to loved ones.
I will end my two cents by adding, as a victim of continuous childhood abuse, I found this book to be very eye-opening. By understanding my brain, I able to understand a little bit more of why I am the way I am, why I constantly live in a perpetual state of fear, and why my body and mind are unable to cope with stress. It is apparent that I have not fully come to terms with my trauma, but I hope to someday, not only for myself, but for my own children now as well. I hope this review was able to help anyone else do the same.