Strengthening Family Connections through Self-Regulation With Dr. Bruce Perry (Replay)

The episode highlights the vital role of self-regulation in parenting, especially in navigating holiday gatherings and family dynamics. Dr. Bruce Perry discusses the importance of understanding brain development and the processes involved in engaging with children emotionally. 

• The significance of regulating oneself before helping children 
• Strategies for approaching holiday gatherings with realistic expectations 
• The role of community support and resources in parenting 
• Understanding brain development through the hierarchy of functions 
• Importance of rupture and repair in parent-child relationships 
• Fostering resilience through connectedness and shared experiences 
• Overcoming the stigma of parenting struggles and being proactive 

Leave a rating and review for the podcast. Rate the podcast, leave a review and just send me an email. Let me know that you did it and I will send you Meltdown Mountain, which is a printable that you can put right up on your fridge and have the language to talk to your child about emotional awareness and what it feels like to be dysregulated.

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Chapters

• 0:02 Regulating Yourself for Successful Engagement
• 5:58 Understanding Brain Development and Regulation
• 21:06 Navigating Challenges in Parenting
• 25:47 Parenting Challenges and Support Systems
• 35:53 Challenges in Systemic Change
• 47:16 Healing Trauma and Building Connections
• 1:03:38 Building Resilience Through Everyday Moments
• 1:09:13 Fostering Child Connection and Resilience
• 1:17:59 Parental Self-Regulation and Child Advocacy

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

You can most successfully engage people if you first regulate yourself. Make sure that you're regulated, and that that's because human beings are contagious.

Speaker 2: 0:22

Hello, my dear friend, welcome back to another episode of the Curious Neuron Podcast. My name is Cindy Huffington and I am your host. This was a snippet or a piece of an old school Curious Neuron Podcast. That was episode 100, and that's what we're doing today. I know that last week we celebrated episode 200 of the podcast, but I felt it was appropriate to bring back the episode and replay Bruce Perry, dr Bruce Perry on the podcast, because it was such an important conversation and it is the top performing podcast, the podcast episode with the most downloads, so I thought we should bring it to the audience who perhaps hasn't heard my conversation with him, and so today is a replay episode. I hope you're all having wonderful holidays. It is the last week of December and next week we jump into 2025. For those of you who are members inside the Reflective Parent Club because most of the members are from the podcast I hope that you enjoyed the resources that we had over at the end of December.

Speaker 2: 1:25

I wanted to make sure that parents approached any family gathering or outing or event, or even family vacations, by setting expectations. I know that sometimes we go into these events thinking, hey, you know what? Maybe Aunt Susie won't make that comment about weight or food or being skinny or overweight, whatever it is about weight or food, or being skinny or overweight, whatever it is. Or maybe your expectations are around our kids, thinking they won't have a tantrum. I think everything will go well. I want them to not have a tantrum. I don't want to have to manage emotions in front of everybody, but when these things don't happen and it doesn't meet our expectations, it's very easy for us to become extremely angry, to have our mood impacted, our energy decreases and that can impact the day that we have with our child and how we respond to them. We start reacting to them instead, and so we approached inside the membership, the Reflective Parent Club, ways that we could think about these expectations and speak to our partners about expectations. And speak to our partners about expectations and speak to the family members that are going to be around, maybe explain to them some of our family values that might not be aligned with the values of our own upbringing, and then also having conversations with our kids. So if you're listening to this and you still have some holiday parties left, just take a moment to think about that and if you need all of the information around that a moment to think about that, and if you need all of the information around that, the Reflective Parent Club has its own podcast.

Speaker 2: 2:49

So I record audios that share my own life experiences sort of what you're hearing about here, but in a lot more detail and I post PDFs and reflection prompts, workbooks for you, workbooks for your child. We even had this week, instead of having our weekly call well, we did have a weekly call, but instead of it just being parents, we invited children to our call and I think that we're going to do this over again because it was so good. We talked about emotional awareness with Meltdown Mountain and children really enjoyed drawing the mountain and talking about what makes them either walk, run or take a rocket all the way to the top of the mountain, and parents felt that they were giving their kids that sort of language around emotions. If, by the way, I've brought back Meltdown Mountain onto my website, I'm going to post the link below If you would like to have it for free. Leave a rating and a review for the podcast. So click out now so you don't forget. Rate the podcast, leave a review and just send me an email. Let me know that you did it and I will send you Meltdown Mountain, which is a printable that you can put right up on your fridge and have the language to talk to your child about emotional awareness and what it feels like to be dysregulated. You can do that through this PDF. So just send me an email and make sure you rate and review the podcast, and if the Reflective Parent Club is something you want to jump into for the new year, I've left our Black Friday sale so it's still available.

Speaker 2: 4:18

You want to grab that now, because the prices are going to be going back after the holidays and now you could join for just $50 for three months, and so that breaks down to $6 and a few cents every week for a one hour call with me every single week and a weekly, a monthly expert and more podcast episodes, pdfs. We have a book club within the Reflective Parent Club and next month, so in January, we're going to have Erika Josa, who is the founder and CEO of MomWell. She is our book of the month for January and we're also bringing her in as a Q&A expert, and so this is the kind of things that we do inside the club. So I'll see you inside and, by the way, you also get two weeks for free so that you can determine if it's meant for you. All right, and as always, before we begin, I'd like to thank the Tannenbaum Open Science Institute, as well as the McConnell Foundation, for sponsoring the podcast. Without them, this would not be possible, and without you. So please share the podcast with friends and family and share it on Facebook pages for parents, share it at work inside a newsletter or let HR know, and they'll share it around, because parents and well-being matters. And follow us on Instagram at curious underscore neuron. All right. So if you are one of the very few people that don't know about Dr Bruce Perry or whose life hasn't been altered or changed by his books one being what happened to you and the second one being the boy who was raised as a dog His work is important for so many people, whether you work with children, whether you have children, or even just for yourself, whether you are a clinician, an educator, anyone To help us understand the brain and how it is affected by our early childhood. His work is just some of the most important work that I've seen. He is the principal of the Neurosequential Network and a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. He has been working for the past 30 years as a teacher, clinician, researcher in children's mental health and neurosciences, and holds a variety of academic positions.

Speaker 2: 6:23

We've waited long enough. It's a long interview so you might want to break this down and listen to some parts of it. You know, piece by piece I could not break it into two parts. It's just so good I don't want to, you know, cut anything. So the full interview is there. You can also watch it on YouTube if you want. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr Bruce Perry and thank you to Claudia for joining me on this conversation. She is part of the Curious Neuron podcast team and was the reason why he ended up joining me at the podcast. I cannot take any credit. She was awesome and thank you. I will see you on the other side, dr Perry. Thank you so much for joining me today at the Curious Neuron podcast.

Speaker 1: 7:03

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2: 7:05

Claudia and I are beyond excited to have this conversation with you, and so are the parents that knew that I was talking with you today. I have read your book, what Happened to you, and I personally think, having worked with parents now for a few years, I know that it would help them so much to understand really the biological organization of their child's brain. Because a lot of parents will reach out and say you know, I told my child to calm down when they were screaming or crying and it didn't work. Or why is my child behaving this way? You know, what can I do to help them? Or why do they scream? I yell at them, they yell at me. What's wrong? Why can't we stop this cycle? And I think a lot of that touches on the work that you do. Can you explain a little bit about that? You've explained it so beautifully in your books this bottom-up approach and how we can't get to the cortex without regulating. Can you explain that aspect of your work, please? Sure.

Speaker 1: 7:53

So, as you know very well, one of the major challenges of talking to anybody about the brain and human behavior is that it's complicated, right? You know, there are lots of things that can influence the way people think and the way people feel, and we've always taken the perspective that if you know a few basics about the human brain, certain things just make more sense. And one of the key concepts that we try to teach is that the brain is organized in this hierarchical way. Where that very top part of our brain and most people have heard of the term cortex, that's the part of your brain that has systems in it that allow us to speak there are neural networks that are involved in reflecting on the past and anticipating the future. And when you teach your kids about right and wrong, the part of the brain you're trying to change is the cortex. And when you teach your kids language, when you teach them math, history, almost any of the traditional topics in education are going to involve that top part of your brain. And now this part of the brain is a very special part of the human body because it's the most uniquely human part of our whole body. Human beings have a heart and they have a lung and they have pancreas and bones and muscle and everybody kind of knows that. But the DNA that codes for all of those systems is very similar to the DNA from other mammals. So we're kind of cow-like when it comes to muscles and bones and we're monkey-like and we're not that much advanced from rats when you look at some of our organs. But if you look at the brain, particularly the top part of our brain, that's the most uniquely human part of us and it's really what allows us to be the unique individuals that we are. That's a really important part of us. Now the dilemma is that part of our brain develops very slowly. It's not fully developed until you're probably in your late 20s, when you're very young. That part of your brain that allows you to be most thoughtful and rational and regulated, that part of your brain, as any parent can tell you, that's undeveloped. It's there but it's not really as efficient as an adult brain. So that's one issue with communicating with kids and understanding children, actually understanding anybody.

Speaker 1: 10:50

The second is that the way your brain organizes and this is very inaccurate. I'm sure all the neuroscientists who hear this are just going to cringe Think of the brain a little bit like a layer cake. There are lower parts of the brain that mediate very regulatory things heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature and stuff like that and those are important. But as you get higher in the brain, higher in this layer cake, more complex functions are mediated by systems that are in those areas and then finally you get to this, really the top part of your brain. That is the most uniquely human part of our brain, that when you talk to your kids, that's what you're trying to reach, is that top part of the brain. So because of this layer cake, you know this development, developmental process that is bottom up, the brain develops from the bottom to the top. We also have a matching processing of sensory input from the bottom to the top.

Speaker 1: 11:56

So every time you hear, see, smell, touch anything, it doesn't go directly to your cortex, it doesn't go to that smart part of your brain.

Speaker 1: 12:09

It goes to lower parts of your brain that are much more regulatory.

Speaker 1: 12:14

They process and act on information in a very different way than that most uniquely human part of the brain processes and acts on information.

Speaker 1: 12:21

So the trick in talking with a child is that your words are going to be turned into patterned neuronal activity that start in the lowest part of the child's brain. That's a very reactive part of the brain, and then it goes up through this kind of middle part of the brain where it's a little bit more of an emotional part of your brain and then it will ultimately get to that rational reasoning part of the brain and that's a sequence. So we can't expect that sequence to go perfectly well, that sequence to go perfectly well, particularly if a child is frustrated, hungry, thirsty, cold, upset, because the lower parts of the brain start to send, if you will, disorganizing input to higher parts of the brain when you get hungry, thirsty, cold and everything else like that, and I think any parent listening knows that the hardest time of the day is towards four or five, six o'clock, right, everybody's coming back from school or work and you're hungry and you've been holding it together at work all day.

Speaker 1: 13:41

They've been holding it together at school and you get back together and the wise parent knows all right, I need to feed my child, I need to regulate myself, I need to calm down. Let's get them fed, let's get them regulated in some other way.

Speaker 1: 14:00

Maybe it's do your sport, run around, do a little video game, kind of regulate yourself that way, maybe it's do your sport, run around, do a little video game, kind of regulate yourself that way and then we'll talk about homework. But if the first question is where's your homework? And it just blows up, it's a mess.

Speaker 2: 14:16

It's not setting your child up for success that evening. It's just not yet.

Speaker 1: 14:20

Exactly. And so this whole sequential processing of information leads to a very simple mantra about what we call the sequence of engagement. You can most successfully engage people if you first regulate yourself, make sure that you're regulated, and that's because human beings are contagious. And so if you are frazzled you're going to dysregulate your child or your partner or whoever you're supervising or whatever. So you need to sort of take a deep breath and, to the degree that you can regulate yourself and then engage the child or engage whoever it is, recognizing that what you say and the way you are with that child is first going to go through this very primitive, reactive part of their brain and then the emotional part of the brain and finally to the part of their brain that can reason.

Speaker 1: 15:19

So you have to recognize that if you're regulated, you can then help regulate your child. Recognize that if you're regulated, you can then help regulate your child, and then you can relate, you can connect with them and then, if that's in place, then they can hear accurately what you're saying. But if you don't regulate them and you say where's your homework, you'll hear stuff like don't yell at me. You're always critical and you're like I didn't yell, and they're like you're yelling. No, I'm, no, I'm.

Speaker 1: 15:46

Pretty soon you co-disregulate each other exactly and every parent has had that happen and everybody in their relationships had that happen.

Speaker 1: 15:55

And as you and as you have that sort of that dysregulating interaction, you start to get dumber and more emotional and more reactive and you say things that you don't really mean. And then you have to have this cooling off part and you have to kind of reconnect. And that's the interesting thing about human this is one of the most important things that we try to help people appreciate is that human communication is as much about repair of rupture as it is about this continuous cortex to cortex connection, because we don't telepathically communicate with precision and accuracy what's in our cortex. Think about the people you love most in your life. How often do you say that's not what I meant. Let me say it again, let me clarify it Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and so again, I think that that's one of the hardest parts about parenting is reminding and helping parents appreciate that, listen, there are these unavoidable neurobiological principles that you cannot fight. If you don't respect the sequence of engagement, you will not successfully get what's in your cortex into your child's cortex.

Speaker 2: 17:19

This is why I wish you know. I think back to my own prenatal classes, and they taught you how to hold the baby and they taught you how to hold the baby and they taught you how to feed the baby and what to do at night. But they never told us this, and if only for myself. I had three young kids and it was only by the time I had the third that I realized I needed to work on myself and things were difficult and you have three very small kids under the age of four and you're like what am I doing? I'm lost.

Speaker 2: 17:45

But I hadn't realized that my own system needed some help and that I came from a childhood that was a little bit more troubled and, you know, struggled with my parents, divorce and all that. And by going back to that I learned how to regulate myself and that that changed everything in the way that I was parenting. With all the work and the research you've done and all the conversations you've had around this, is this something you also wish like as a society, that we kind of break this cycle, because I mean, I keep hearing parents saying I want to stop yelling but I can't, but then the work isn't being done, so how do we like stop this cycle from happening?

Speaker 1: 18:21

You know, cindy, that's a first of all. There's a lot of really good and important observations in that, and I really wish that we would recognize how important it is for success in every aspect of life to know a little bit about how the brain works yeah, I agree and how it develops. I mean, we'd be better police officers, teachers, we'd be better partners, parents, everything would be easier if we knew more about this. And you know, most of us learn these things by accident, right? Like you said, you had three kids and by the time you had your third, you're like you figured out that, hey, it doesn't work if I'm not regulated, right, if I'm hungry, thirsty, cold, upset, frazzled, I can't communicate effectively with anybody in the family. And so I think, first of all, I think one of the things that's important about what you're doing and part of what our organization is trying to do, we're trying to back these concepts into public education. We think these things are as important as learning the quadratic equation or learning other things that we intentionally teach in a systematic way to everybody.

Speaker 1: 19:42

And I think if people learned a little bit about what we refer to as state dependent functioning, you know just the recognition that when people are distressed or stressed, they're going to have a harder time with learning new concepts and with retrieving concepts that they've learned right.

Speaker 1: 20:01

So people can learn all kinds of stuff. But if you stress them they're not going to easily retrieve that and act on it so that that would've learned right. So people can learn all kinds of stuff. But if you stress them they're not going to easily retrieve that and act on it so that fundamental body of knowledge is really helpful in figuring out how to set up a classroom where kids can effectively learn, for example, or testing circumstances where children can perform better and really show you what they know. Because a lot of kids get really anxious about being tested and they've learned the concepts and literally if they went with the teacher and they walked down the hallway and the teacher asked the questions, the child would be able to answer everyone with 100%. But if they're forced to sit down in a classroom and not move and retrieve it under a time pressure, they can't write down the answers Turning off their cortex, basically.

Speaker 1: 20:52

Exactly, claudia, exactly, and so we've been trying to back some of these concepts into public education in a way that it will help people in whatever, whatever they do. But I, you know, I, cindy, I was lucky that I was a parent before I became a clinician. So I uh had children when I was in in medical school and then I went and got my phd and then I came back and finished medical school and went on to do my training. So by the time I was kind of getting clinical training in how to be with kids, I knew that a lot of that was just bullshit. I mean, excuse my language, I'm like wait, that's not yeah, that's not the way kids act.

Speaker 1: 21:39

And I was like, wait a minute, I have kids, that's, that's not what you do. So I was fortunate that I knew some of these things. I didn't have all the language, but I'd been studying the stress response systems in animal models and their development as a scientist. And then I had children and so over time I kind of realized that what I was learning in the lab had relevance for the way I was parenting and for what I was seeing, and it helped me with. One of my kids had sleep issues and one of my kids had regulation issues and one of my kids was like perfect, we thought we were perfect parents. That's the irony right. Our first child was like you know, I'd say stuff like don't do that, and he'd go okay, and then he wouldn't do it. I'm like wow, I'm a great parent.

Speaker 2: 22:27

I've got this, yet.

Speaker 1: 22:28

And then our second child was like what the hell? You know, she didn't like, she was very dysregulated, and so she taught me more about all of this stuff than anything else. And the key, I think, is that many parents are going to have children that have different constitutional gifts. Right, Some kids tolerate a lot of sensory complexity, some kids don't. And the way you parent one child isn't necessarily going to work with another child, and I think we don't teach parents that very much. We kind of have this idea that there is a parenting. You know, somebody out there really knows a lot about parenting. We don't.

Speaker 2: 23:14

Or a playbook somewhere.

Speaker 1: 23:16

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 23:16

That we can just follow and everything will be fine.

Speaker 1: 23:18

Right, and the funny thing is that there are people that exploit that. The funny thing is that there are people that exploit that and you know, you go into any bookstore. There's whole aisles filled with how to parent and that, more than anything, illustrates to me what a bad job we do at teaching people how to parent. Right, we just don't do a very good job with it. I mean, a lot of people feel unsure of themselves. People that get doctorates in, you know, are supposed to know all I know. People that have doctorates in child development then they make parents are like, oh my God, I don't know what the hell to do.

Speaker 2: 23:53

Same, yeah, and it's true, and you know, I think parents are looking for some sort of resource and this is why parenting platforms, you know, do well. But I think that if we can just share the research and a parent has to learn how to be attuned and understand their child before anything else, that we're reacting certain ways, you know, with our child, then we'll never parent the way that we want to. It doesn't matter what the books say, it doesn't matter if you should have a timeout or not. All these are really big and important conversations still happening in the parenting world, and it was interesting for me to come out of neuroscience and end up in this parenting world because I you know, I didn't know what all these myths that were going around or these misconceptions about parenting are, all people pushing certain models that there's no backup to these types of parenting.

Speaker 1: 24:56

But in the end, you know, if you look at the research, they talk about being sensitive to your child's needs and and like nurturing them, and and you know and this is what I'm trying to push out there- yeah, and parenting is such an interesting thing because when you start to look at the Western version of parenting, we take a couple and actually in the US and other places there's a lot of single parents that are given this huge body of responsibility to meet the emotional, the social, the motor, the cognitive and the material needs of multiple kids with multiple strengths and gifts themselves all at once, and that's a demand that is fundamentally biologically disrespectful. Yeah, and I keep pointing out to people that listen human beings, we're animals. I mean we're organized physiologically for a different world than we've created, and the world that our biology is suited for was a multifamily, you know relatively small but very relationally close community. You know multi-generational multifamily groups, and in those groups there was alloparenting, there were multiple people who were involved in modeling for children, in teaching children, in disciplining children, in rewarding children, and so the ratio of developmentally mature individual that could play a role in that alloparenting process was four to one.

Speaker 1: 26:45

And so we now have a world, the Western world, where we're all compartmentalized and we are sometimes, like I said, having one parent and multiple young kids that they're supposed to be responsible for, and it's a demand that's unrealistic, it wears out the parent, and it's a demand that's unrealistic. It wears out the parent and because of the contagion of human beings if the dominant person in the caregiving environment is overwhelmed and exhausted and disconnected, so that they can then be their best for the children that they're raising? And then also, how do we, in a mobile society that's parsed out the way we are parsed out, everybody has their own little home, their own little room, and you live 200 miles away from your parents. And how do we create a family of choice, right? Can we engage the retired couple down the hall to be part of our little child's life? Can we find a community of you know whether it's a community of faith or a community of activity or something where our kids can be around other people?

Speaker 1: 28:06

Because what would happen in a in sort of a relationally rich hunter-gatherer clan is that the child would basically in many ways guide their own development based upon their needs. So if they were developing motor skills faster than same-age peers, there were lots of places for them to do that. They would just move to a different group of people in the community to practice the motor skill. And your development was not determined by your age. It was determined by your developmental capabilities and interests.

Speaker 1: 28:52

And in that group there were people who were good with motor skills. There were people that were good with large motor skills. There were people that were good being funny. There were people good storytellers, but not everybody had to be all of that. Right now, if you're a single parent, you're supposed to be good at throwing the ball, good at teaching somebody how to knit, good at showing art, good at nurturing, and then, oh, by the way, you have to also discipline them, and so that is that creates this impossible ask on a on a single parent, and I think it's just overwhelming for a lot of people.

Speaker 3: 29:29

I find also there's some stigma in society where you have a single parent who's trying to lean on their parents so the children's grandparents and they're trying to have some time for themselves, they're trying to better themselves and then the society is like no, no, no, you can't lean on your parents, you have to be working by yourself and doing this properly or you're not adequate, and I think that's such a problem.

Speaker 1: 29:51

Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right, claudia. I think the stigma of there's two parts of that. One is that even if you're not sort of leaning on X, you know your family. There's this weird guilt feeling that people are given if you're a parent, if you go to your book club and you go work out and you do the things that keep you healthy, then you're somehow viewed as not being present in parenting.

Speaker 1: 30:19

But if you don't take care of yourself, you're not going to be able to to be a present parent in a good way. So I think that that first of all, we have to get better at allowing people to do that, and that's a that's a pervasive problem throughout our field, you know education, mental health and all. But then the other part is I think you're absolutely right that there's this weird and unfair just perspective about parenting that it's not recognizing the importance of alloparenting or the importance of engaging others and relying on others to help you parent. And the truth is, nobody can do this well by themselves. It's just very, very hard. I mean, even when you have a partner and resources and pretty healthy kids, it's really hard to parent.

Speaker 3: 31:13

This just puts a light on, like, the difficulties of being a parent in a, you know, in a socioeconomic environment that's not very adequate. You know, being under poverty line. How are you supposed to parent? How are you supposed to take care of yourself when you're, you know, being under poverty line? How are you supposed to parent? How are you supposed to take care of yourself when you're, you know, working three jobs or have three kids that all have different health issues? Like, how is it possible to be a good parent in this situation?

Speaker 1: 31:37

Yeah Well, we actually. We've developed a measure to look at the it's called the caregiving challenge tool and it's basically what it is is a very simple tool that we have a few items where we look at what are the internal resources of the parent, you know, do they have good mental health? Do they have an education? Are they physically healthy? Are they in good relationships? And then what are the external resources? Are they in connected to extended family community? Do they have friends and other people that participate?

Speaker 1: 32:18

So we kind of look at that and then we balance that against the demands of the children, right? So the age of the child, the special needs of the child, the number of children, and what we find by and large is, if you are, even if you have, a partner and you have all of these internal resources and all of the availability of external resources, and then you have three kids that are of average, three kids that the typical parent is essentially out of balance in terms of having enough reserve for their own health, welfare and growth. So, at baseline, the healthy Western family with a partner in the family, living in the family, helping with economic supports and everything else still, is going to lead to exhausted, burned out, overwhelmed parent who is the primary parent taking care of the kids Wow, taking care of the kids. And then when you add in, if you then do, claudia, what you're saying, that if you say, all right, I have a child who's got special needs, I've got a child who's delayed because I was exhausted or I have a little trouble with substance abuse, I have no connection to external family, I have no friends.

Speaker 1: 33:40

When you start to look at a lot of these families that we work with and see what few reserves they have, the numbers we get are just shocking. I mean, it is so absolutely predictable that they're going to burn out and that they're going to feel inadequate and overwhelmed and they're going to manage that by usually maladaptive things. You know they're going to blunt their pain with substance use, they get more frustrated more frequently, and so forth. For me, one of the things that's so frustrating is that we get this no-transcript and then we show this to our child protective community and they'll see a mother who's got five or six kids that are out of home. All of them are kind of struggling.

Speaker 1: 34:31

They're all being managed in different settings with lots of resources, and then the mother is stopped using and she's starting to get her stuff back together and it's got a little place to live. And then the decision is is let's reunify, and they put all those kids back in the house at the same time, without any external supports, and it's 100% predictable that this is going to fail. And we show them this time and time and time again. Finally, the systems we were working with, that we did this tool with, they said we don't want you to measure that anymore, because once you measure it, it just shows how inadequate we are. They just they said we would rather not know.

Speaker 3: 35:11

That's a bit ridiculous yeah.

Speaker 1: 35:13

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 35:14

And this is one of the questions I think both Claudia and I had for you is given the amount of the number of years and the amount of research that you've put out there and all the talks that you've given, the books you've put out, why isn't our system changing Right? Like I'm thinking about the education system, I'm thinking about even our local healthcare system, our local, you know, child protective services. Nobody is following the system, when the research is clear in our minds. Why aren't we? Why don't we have a trauma-informed healthcare system with our kids? Why are we still just labeling and looking at symptoms? Why hasn't this changed yet? I could imagine the frustration on your end. What are these barriers?

Speaker 1: 35:57

First of all, let me just say you guys are young, you know, and I was once young, and so to me, I have seen change. Okay, now it's slow, but I have seen change or any academic meeting or any professional body where there isn't some conversation about equity, about there's conversations about trauma, there are conversations about now there's finally, they're starting to talk about positive experiences as well as negative experiences. So what happens is systems just are harder to change. Let me just back up a second. So if you learn a little bit about biology and this is where the science is really helpful when you learn about the physiology of any dynamic system in the human body or any living system, when the system gets to a certain equilibrium, there are a whole bunch of mechanisms that resist change, right. So when you get stressed, there are systems that put you back in balance, right. Those are our stress response capabilities, and most systems have a very powerful set of processes that keep things the same.

Speaker 1: 37:28

Now, big systems even though we don't think about them this way, they're like biological organisms. Big sort of bureaucratic systems are literally like big organisms and they have lots of ways to maintain equilibrium for the system, which means if you have a hierarchical system that is a carry forward of a colonizing, dominance-based, power-based system. It has all kinds of things that will keep power at the top, and even when there's pressure from the outside to change or internally to change, there are all kinds of mechanisms that make people feel that diffuse the energy. So big systems, when they finally realize they have to focus on the trauma is a real thing, they'll do some crazy bullshit like, oh, we're going to have a trauma informed in service, and then they check the box and then they'll get away For the next 10 years. They'll get away with saying, well, we're trauma-informed, or then the people will go that's not enough. It's not enough to have an equity in-service. You really have to hire some people of color to be in positions of leadership. So then they'll pick one person to be on their board. And so they have all these incremental ways to diffuse external energy and external agents of change, because they neutralize them and they're always intending to maintain their power and they're very successful at it.

Speaker 1: 39:21

And all organizations do it both consciously and unconsciously, and people don't recognize it. You know, some of the most common ways to maintain power are in. Academics is a perfect example of this. Academics does this all the time. They'll have a consensus panel and they'll pull people together and they'll get the usual suspects and they might invite a few people that are kind of representative of the groups that they're trying to represent or change or be kowtow to or whatever they're trying to do, and for that period of time that neutralizes, it's true, and after a while people figure out well, that didn't do it, nothing has changed, you know, and the same thing happens.

Speaker 1: 40:04

We passed civil rights laws, you know, and the same thing happens like we passed civil rights laws, you know, 50 plus years ago, but we still have issues around equity, racism and so forth. And so people are finally recognizing hey, wait a minute, you know, we pass this civil rights or the voting act, right, you know, voting rights laws and all these things, and and and, and. For a while government checked the box and said what are you saying? We're racist. And then people wake up and go wait a minute, wait a minute, you are racist. And then they get angry and then they go oh, you know what? Maybe we won't do advertising with this company that does bad stuff, or we'll do that. And then people go oh, yeah, okay. So the outrage isused and it takes a while to build up again. And all big systems, whatever the topic is, whether it's trauma or learn about attachment, or misogyny or the Me Too thing the bullshit that gets tolerated in these systems to maintain power is outrageous. You know. You see, look at Jeff Epstein, you know there's look at Jeff Epstein, you know like there's examples of it all around.

Speaker 1: 41:08

And I think part of what people need to recognize is that as long as our systems are just explicit and overt manifestations of traditional colonial systems you know manifestations of traditional colonial systems, you know structure we won't be able to solve that problem.

Speaker 1: 41:29

We literally I don't want to say blow things up. But if we could reorganize things from the bottom up, it would be a lot easier than taking the existing system and trying to reorganize it the way we want it, and that's part of the problem. Now, fortunately, in the US, for example, there are a number of places that are working on reorganizing the child welfare system and of course, what will happen is this is going to be a 10-year process where they've already convened and they explicitly say we're going to change the child welfare system, we shouldn't do it this way, we shouldn't do it that way. And then they have meetings and they publish papers and they have a special thing in this organization. And then you look 10 years later, you go wait a minute, did we really change? And you go, fuck, no, we didn't change, it's the same exactly Same shit.

Speaker 1: 42:11

It's got a different name right, and so this is part of what we have to confront. We have to keep calling bullshit on these processes. But the dilemma is this If you're in academics or if you're in any policymaking position, any position of influence, we're human beings. We're so vulnerable to being oh, I got invited to the White House, and so the White House, for example, one of the favorite mechanisms of power is to have a White House dinner and a White House conference, and 20 years ago they had a White House conference on early childhood brain development. Only because Rob Reiner pushed the issue and they invited people like me and Terry, you know, t Barry Brazelton, and we talked about this and Bill Clinton shook our hands and patted us on the back and, oh, this is so important.

Speaker 1: 43:00

And 20 years later nothing has changed. But it diffused the power. It diffused sort of the energy that was being mobilized to change these systems. Now I don't want to say nothing has changed because little things have changed. You know, in California they passed some laws to fund early childhood programs and there's a lot of really good things evolving and you know there are things that happen, but it's very slow, in part because we are fighting this.

Speaker 1: 43:30

To many people it's an invisible set of systems, but if you step outside the system, this is highly visible. So when I stepped out of the conventional academic world, I'm like, wait a minute, no wonder this never works. It's the same damn people creating an echo chamber. They meet together, they pat each other on the back, they say they're addressing equity or trauma or attachment or whatever, and they publish a few things. And they publish the same study 50 times. And rather than actually going, hey, why don't we actually go spend some time with the Cree women and see how they raise their children and learn a little bit about real attachment-based behaviors and how you know co-sleeping and how do they handle that? And they would, god forbid we learn anything from them. We have to go tell them how to raise their kids. Anyway, I could go on and on. I'm sorry. Well, I could go on and on, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2: 44:25

Well, I had experienced something similar. I was when I was working at the Mental Health Institute here in Montreal. We had a program that we were trying to get into some of the native, like the reserves here in Canada, and I had, for the first time in my life, jumped on a call with some of these people leading these communities and they were like we don't want to be part of your stupid program. And I was like what do you mean? Like I was a naive, like you know, 20, 30 year old or whatever I was at that time. But I was like why we're going to help bring, you know, mental health, you know, resources to your community and this should be an important you know thing for you. And they're like no, it's bullshit, because we've done this so many times and all these projects come into our communities and tell us they're going to do something and then five years pass and nothing has changed. And they've used our names on their papers and they've tried to, you know, do whatever it was and nothing has changed. And we still have high suicide rates and high levels of abuse within the community and nothing is changing. So I completely get that and I think that's a big part of the conversation we need to have. I love how it went into this direction, but you know it's part of the whole parent, but it's part of this parenting conversation and the changes that we want to see.

Speaker 2: 45:34

You know, I one of the things I wanted to bring up there were two things that marked me during your talk at McGill. You mentioned you touched on this a little bit with the connectedness and I'll get to that in a second but first was how you got into all of this and I'd like to play-based work with kids and trying to help them with their cognitive skills. And I remember I was pregnant with my third child and this one child that I was working with I was told he's very dangerous. He has, you know, oppositional defiant disorder and he urinates on people and you know we're giving him as a client, you know you're going to work with him, but we just want you to to be safe. And I remember being really scared of this seven-year-old boy and and going into this room and you know seeing all these toys and now are they going to be used, you know, against me and am I going to get hurt? And I, I'm pregnant and and a month and a half two months later it came out during play that he was being physically abused within his home by his father and it just marked me like how he was on heavy medication because of the disorder that he had been diagnosed with.

Speaker 2: 46:51

And it wasn't that, it was more than that. Somebody should have questioned what was going on in the home. So, anyways, I just wanted to share that because that that changed everything I did with Curious Neuron. It wasn't about playing anymore and just like talking to the child, it was about talking to the parent now and showing them that the environment makes a difference on their child. But, claudia, would you like to share that story, because you had a story as well that I really appreciated, yeah.

Speaker 3: 47:16

So just doing my PhD work in suicide and depression and child abuse brings me into a lot of contact with the general public as well as parents and a lot of parents who are taking care of children who are adopted from very abusive homes. So particularly I worked very closely with a mother who is bringing a case against basically our child protective services here in Quebec because her daughter, who was adopted from the US, was abused severely in multiple different realms of abuse, from zero to five years old and she is, you know, she's diagnosed with oppositional, defiant disorder, conduct disorder, adhd, all of these you know DSM-5 diagnoses. But nobody asked, like what the abuse like changed in her brain, what is really fundamentally different about this girl's brain? And so the mother is working really hard to bring neuroscience into her psychiatrist's office, like her child's psychiatrist's office, and they're really against it. They don't want to hear. They don't want to hear it.

Speaker 3: 48:27

You know like I would send her studies, she would read them, she would talk about it with her child's psychiatrist. Don't want to hear it. But why, like? Why? I don't understand Well that's interesting.

Speaker 1: 48:40

I just got off a call with a bunch of people in Cleveland who are social workers, who had been in public systems, who left those systems and are now in a special project to be assigned to community recreation centers. So they're going to be. They're kind of the mental health's presence at a traditional community rec center where kids will go. And in Cleveland there's a lot of communities, lots of poverty, community violence and so forth. So the idea is that their understanding and experience in the area of trauma and mental health will be a good support to what's going on recreationally there. Anyway, that matches a lot with the big project we have with Nike and some other people in sport. But one of the things we talked about was the dilemma of the well-trained clinician who, like if you go into social work or you go into whatever our fields, you learn about things that we realize are very important to understanding people and and helping people. But the systems, going back to the systems are structured in a way that forces people to practice differently than they're trained. So there's a very, very few child psychiatrists that are trained to just see kids and prescribe, see kids diagnosed and prescribed, but that's what most of them are doing. And so when you're in a situation where there's dissonance between what you think is best for kids and the way you're forced to practice Because you know what you got to pay a mortgage you got to, you know you have to make a living you don't see any other way to practice child psychiatry except the way I'm being told to practice by. You know, and I can tell you that most people that are trained in child psychiatry want to practice differently than they're forced to in these systems.

Speaker 1: 50:49

So what happens is, after a while, there's a few ways that you can survive an environment like that because it's a true moral injury and just kind of robotically do your work, using dissociation as an adaptive mechanism, or you sort of allow your cognitive distortions to take place and you start to believe that I'm only doing evidence-based practice. And oh, there's tons of evidence. And there is no evidence that most of these medications work, by the way, and in fact there's evidence to the contrary. I don't want to get into that. So when they're presented with something that challenges their little sort of delusional bubble, they don't want to see it, they really don't want to see it, and so what they'll do is they'll ignore it and then, if they can't ignore it, they'll attack it, because they'll say what's the evidence? That's bad evidence, and the irony is there's no evidence that shows that what they're doing is prescribing five medications.

Speaker 1: 51:52

But that's what happens. People end up and I don't want to call it brainwashing, but it's very similar cognitively to what happens to people that get into an inescapable, unavoidable cognitive trap and they have to start believing that what I'm doing is the right way or it would just drive them crazy. So that's what I think is happening. I think that people tolerate bad practice in the beginning and then, over time, they start to actually think that it's good practice and then, when they're confronted with stuff that challenges it, they don't want to see it. They just don't want to see it, Especially if it's presented by somebody who's not a physician. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 52:34

That's true. Yes, I'm putting myself, you know, I'm placing myself in the shoes of parents that are listening right now. And if they themselves are in this position where they did experience childhood adversity and are noticing now that this is showing up in their emotion dysregulation with their child and they might not have the means to get some help or get some therapy, what can they do at this point? Um and this perhaps will touch upon that point you mentioned during the mcgill, which was the connectedness but what can they do? And if it is connectedness, how can we, like you said, in the society where we're really in silos, we're in our homes and we're not getting together like we used to do? Even I think about like my grandmother talking about like kids never coming in and everybody?

Speaker 2: 53:21

just hanging out outside and her kids going to people's houses and coming back later. I don't know, like even just that, like a couple of years ago, but how do we move forward with this?

Speaker 1: 53:31

That's really such a good question and here's the message I want everybody to hear is that people get better when, without necessarily having conventional therapy, you can get better. And the key to getting better is almost always connected to or related to your ability to find people in your life who can be present and nonjudgmental and kind and patient and understanding. And some people are very lucky to be able to create that and find that. Sometimes they find it in a community of faith, sometimes they find that in by reconnecting to their culture. You know, starting to go into powwows and starting to be part of that world and and and the relationships and the meals and the laughter and the dancing, those things will help you heal. But it really is hard if you don't have a little coaching or don't have a little bit of help right, so I would. You know I always encourage people to reach out a little bit, even though there are not a lot of resources. You know the mental health system in the US and I know in Canada it's really stretched. You know there's like long waiting lists and a lot of times when you do get in, you know you don't necessarily get somebody who's going to be perfect for you and that sort of thing. But there are places where you can connect to people who may have similar experiences, and that's one of the positive things about web-based stuff. There are several kind of communities of survivors of either domestic violence or survivors of residential school experience, of residential school experience. There are communities out online that might be worth exploring as a start to make those connections. And then I always really encourage people to think about their own extended family. Who's healthy in your extended family? Was there an uncle? Is there a grandparent? You know are? Are some of these people present in did? Was there a an old teacher? What did you have? A coach? Did you know what? Whatever it is, if you find a community where you belong whether it's, you know, I'm going to do community theater or I'm going to do whatever it is that's where the healing can start and that's a really important thing.

Speaker 1: 56:13

Part of the dilemma is that and we all are in this we're all in a rut. Everybody that I know, even the most mindful, whatever Buddh, buddhist, whatever they're in their mindfulness rut, we're all in ruts. The inertia of doing what you have been doing is so powerful that if your world has been getting smaller and smaller and smaller. That's one of the first things that happens when you're a parent is your world starts to get smaller. Yeah, true. And then the inertia of being so tired at the end of the day, day that, oh God, I'm not going to call this group or I'm not going to, I'm not going to go to my book club or I'm not going to go to exercise because you're so damn tired.

Speaker 1: 56:53

But if you, you've got to do it, you know, and it helps if you've got a partner right, find one person that's a friend or somebody who you can go, start getting out of these ruts and that will help a lot.

Speaker 1: 57:07

But but a lot of people who feel who've had developmental trauma or other kinds of trauma now are parenting. They're very uncomfortable and reluctant to reach out to other people and um, and so it sometimes it's tough, it's tough, but I would encourage people to to be um, even tiny steps, little steps, you know, even if it's just volunteering at a local, uh, soup kitchen. The reason I say that is that one of the things that I think many people who have been injured developmentally, they have a certain kind of gift of empathy that comes from knowing what it feels like to be marginalized or injured or misunderstood and that when they can then go into an environment where that knowledge and their presence can help other people. I think that's a healing experience and so I would encourage that. Find somebody who you can do something for you with whatever you like to do, and then find something that you can do something for someone else, and I think both of those things will be therapeutic.

Speaker 3: 58:25

I think that's beautiful.

Speaker 2: 58:27

Yeah, and I think it's. At least it's something that parents can start applying today and, like you said, baby steps, small steps if you have to you don't have to be part of every community group tomorrow, but just at least try to get out and connect with people.

Speaker 1: 58:38

And one really good way to do this is to find two or three other young parents and basically swap child care. You know, just say, listen, we're going to have a, I don't have any money to pay for a babysitter, but listen, how about if one night a week I get to go out and you watch my kids? And one night a week, you know you get to go out and I'll watch your kids? And just even that tiny beginning of an opportunity to just even, you know, to connect with somebody around shared babysitting is a good step, because everybody wants to know that they're. You know you are not alone. You are in this together. There are lots of other parents that are struggling with this stuff.

Speaker 2: 59:22

That's actually our most popular part of Curious Neuron. It's called You're Not Alone. On Sundays, parents get to post something on Instagram. They fill in the blank Am I the only one? You know who? Blank? And then they'll put stuff, they'll add whatever. They think they are alone, you know. And then they realize 87% of parents are experiencing this, or you know 75 are experiencing that. And then they realize 87% of parents are experiencing this, or you know 75 are experiencing that. And then they realize, well, I am, I'm not alone, I, I, I am connected to all these people that are experiencing the same thing, and just that makes you feel different.

Speaker 2: 59:55

In that moment, when you think you're the only one whose child doesn't want to go to bed at night, and then you realize you know 99% of us are experiencing the same thing, then you, it's different, you approach that situation differently. I. Our conversation is coming close to an end, unfortunately, um, but I, I am curious about the other side of that. Um, we spoke about the parent, but now I want to bring it to the child. Um, because I have been getting in the past three months a lot of messages from parents who said, who tell me that the environment within their home is either verbally aggressive or physically aggressive as a result of, you know, having been home with their partner, or the stress, you know, during the pandemic, and I'm thinking of the children now that are in this environment. How can we, or what?

Speaker 1: 1:00:52

sort of information can we give parents if their child is in this environment and now they're fearing their child's future and the impact on their development? Well, here's the most important thing is number one every parent has episodes where they do things that probably are not ideal for their kid Every parent. And number two either repairing, reassuring, apologizing you know, when you have a big fight, and it's all crazy, it's important and it's powerful and it helps your child. If you talk with them, say listen, you know, but the key is kind of do it when you're calmer and reassure the child that listen. This stuff happens. Everybody gets upset. You're safe. We both love you. Just give them whatever message you want to give them, and it doesn't have to go on and on and on. Just do that.

Speaker 1: 1:01:53

And the bottom line, though, is that the brain is malleable, and if your child lives through challenging times, there will be opportunities for those challenging times to be buffered by having different kinds of predictable, controllable positive experiences. And again, just reassure people that listen. Every single person on this planet grows up with some crap. I mean, it just happens. You cannot get through life unscathed, and it's just kind of how you handle it, how you counterbalance these things and don't underestimate the power of repair. Communication and relationship is all about rupture and repair, and so when there is a rupture, just repair it, and I think that that can go a long ways towards creating a pattern of stress activation that's more predictable, more controllable, that ultimately leads to resilience as opposed to vulnerability.

Speaker 3: 1:02:55

So one of the questions I actually wanted to get an answer to is how can we help build resilience in our children? So in your books you mentioned a lot of moderate, predictable stress. What form can that take within a household?

Speaker 1: 1:03:11

I'm glad you asked that, claudia. Fortunately for most of us, the traditional educational environment has lots of controllable and moderate stressors and there is predictability. You know when you're going to go and you know. You know if you have a test every Friday in math, you know that that's going to happen. So, and the controllable part is, you know I'm going to do better on, it's going to be less stressful if I actually study, you know.

Speaker 1: 1:03:38

So those things can help create resilience, but so can being in the band, and so can being in sport, and so can being in any kind of other school-based activity drama or whatever you like to do. These things create challenges, but they're moderate challenges and they're usually in a relational environment where you're part of a community, you know you're part of a team, you're part of a, you know you're part of the trumpets and you know you're part of, you know, the theater group, and that allows opportunities for forming relational connections that help buffer some of these challenges. So kids that have the benefit of after-school activities are going to have more opportunities to build resilience, and I think that that's something that parents can always support. Now, I mean, there are times when they're not always ideal. You might not have a great coach and you can have a bad experience, but by and large these can be pretty good experiences. The other thing is that you know normal development is filled with leaving your comfort zone, which activates your stress response, trying something new and then going back into your comfort zone and being reassured. And then going back into your comfort zone and being reassured.

Speaker 1: 1:05:05

So anything that the parent does with the child like I'm going to teach you how to fish, I'm going to teach you how to hunt, I'm going to teach you how to track, I'm going to teach you how to knit, I'm going to teach you how to work in a car Anything that you have your child kind of do with you has a lot of opportunities for you to provide sort of relationally supported opportunities for them to leave their comfort zone, try something new under your guidance, right? No, no, no, no. Turn to the right. Turn to the right, no, no no, no.

Speaker 1: 1:05:40

Yeah, turn to the right. Okay, you got it. Little things like that have them shadow you when you cook, have thematter you when you do all working around the house. And it's so funny because in the beginning, right, you know the little, you know my son. Oh yeah, come on, I want to do the lawnmower. I want to do the lawnmower. And then, after he learns how to do it, he's like, oh God, we get the lawnmower out and he'd disappear.

Speaker 2: 1:06:04

Nope, not doing this.

Speaker 1: 1:06:06

Yeah, exactly so. It's like it's no longer a resilience building experience, dad. But that's the kind of thing that you want to do, right? Include your kids in all these little things that you do, even if it's stuff like shopping or going to pick up your laundry. Shopping or going to pick up your laundry, or, you know, go in and buy me a, you know, go buy this and go get the change, you know, and you can be over there watching them and they can get it, say thank you. All these little things, little predictable things, where you give them an opportunity to leave their comfort zone, and that helps build resilience.

Speaker 2: 1:06:42

Amazing. That just gave me a flashback of this past summer. My five and seven year old asked can we ride a bicycle like three, four houses down? They had never left, like just our little driveway or space, without having us beside them and I'll never forget the image of them being at the fourth house and turning around and high-fiving each other, that they're so far away from the house. But they were, were just so. They were in their, their happy, you know, space of like mommy and daddy are so far, but it was really cute to see that they want to try to push those boundaries and to test them out and but feel safe within that.

Speaker 1: 1:07:16

Exactly, yeah, and that's, and that's kind of what development's all about. Right, you know that, little by little, they. You know that, little by little, they, you know they push to cut their, their comfort zone.

Speaker 2: 1:07:30

And someday they're going to wave to you when they go off to Europe and you know they're going to say see, ya, That'll be harder for me.

Speaker 1: 1:07:33

Exactly that's. That's the thing. It's definitely harder for parents.

Speaker 2: 1:07:37

I guess, to close this conversation, what is it that you wish all new parents would know from your own research and work?

Speaker 1: 1:07:45

that isn't being said enough to recognize that there's power in just being with your child, just being present with your child and enjoying those moments you know you don't have to push them to do this or to do that Just kind of luxuriate in the moment and it's those moments of connection that are in the end going to be create this glue and a sense of safety that will allow your child to feel good leaving this comfort zone. So when your boys sort of high-fived and got to the edge of the known universe, they did that because you had instilled in them a sense of safety and that's such an important thing that your presence and your attention is incredibly important in building changes to the biology of their brain. It front loads them and gives them kind of a neurobiological inoculation so that they can handle stressors later on in life.

Speaker 3: 1:09:09

I think that's great advice and I love the idea of just being present. It's something so small and simple in theory, but it's actually so difficult to do these days, with our phones and emails going off all the time and thinking about where we have to be at 6 pm, our phones and emails going off all the time and thinking about where we have to be at 6 pm. Just being present, I feel like just, even with your partner, with your kids, I feel like it's just one of the most important things that we can do.

Speaker 1: 1:09:34

It is important and, as you pointed out, it's one of the hardest things to do in our modern world that's so filled with distractors. Right, and human beings are very visually biased creatures and so when we have these little screens on and this on and that on, it's so easy to just get pulled out of an interaction and look at your text. But that moment that's a little rupture that you've got to repair and so that, again, to sort of make it easier for you to be present, one of the things that you do want to do is minimize screen presence when you're having these little moments.

Speaker 2: 1:10:10

Because there aren't many, especially with the newborn. My brother-in-law just had a child and they sleep a lot, right, and I told him, whenever your baby's awake, just be present in those moments. And I think many new parents will often send me messages asking like what toy should I buy? Or should I buy these high contrast cards? I don't know, I didn't have those. But in the end it's not about the toys, it's you, the parent.

Speaker 1: 1:10:31

Exactly, you are the best toy your child could ever get.

Speaker 2: 1:10:37

I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to chat with Claudia and.

Speaker 1: 1:10:40

I my pleasure.

Speaker 2: 1:10:41

I enjoyed this conversation so much. Thank you for the work that you do and I hope that in the next 15 years we can see a lot more of those little changes within our systems.

Speaker 1: 1:10:50

We will, we will. You know, listen, first of all, the fact that you've been doing this. You know, the curious neuron is an example of positive change. You know, in the right direction it's happening. It just we what we have. We have to recognize that we're involved in a transgenerational problem-solving process, right, you know these are big issues that we're dealing with and you know it takes a while to solve some of these things, to change these and we're so used to immediate fixing of all our problems.

Speaker 3: 1:11:21

that fixing of all our problems, that yeah, it's it's it's. It's nice to put in place just the idea of transgenerational change. Yeah, it's like we can't just look at our moment, but our parents are our grandchildren exactly.

Speaker 1: 1:11:35

And if we, if we do a good job and we change the direction of positive change, even two or three degrees in the right direction, you know, in a couple generations that's 25 degrees and that's that's a big change. So keep pushing, don't give up. Thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:11:54

Claudia, are you on as much of a high as I am right now? I am, we just had her right. I mean to me that was like just the highlight of my life. I mean there's my kid's birth and my wedding and all that, but then there's Dr Bruce Perry yeah, it was very cool.

Speaker 3: 1:12:10

I will never forget this moment.

Speaker 2: 1:12:12

Yeah, he was so down to earth and we were lucky enough to have a conversation with him before and after the recording as well and, you know, maybe we can like summarize a little bit about that conversation that we had with him. So, if you're a parent and listening to this and just skip to the end, this is a good part to listen to and I think that there were a few things that marked me. There's a question that came in from a mom and she was asking me she wanted to ask him how to repair or reverse the trauma caused to her infant due to her postpartum depression, that she suffered a lot from this and she felt that she wasn't being a good mom and wasn't connected to her child. And you know, first I think I would approach that with the whole community and connection part right, like she, hopefully this person listening and anybody else who's listening.

Speaker 2: 1:13:01

It's not your fault if you have postpartum depression or anxiety and yes, we hear a lot about the research, including from Curious Neuron, that that could impact the relationship or the attachment with your child because you might be a bit more disconnected. But once you take care of yourself and you're okay, do it from either therapy or community. He spoke about that connected part and being part of a community somehow, whether it's religious or spiritual or cultural or whatever it is, neighbors and getting together with friends and people. So take care of yourself first. But also I think, like for me, that that connects with the whole rupture and repair that he spoke of.

Speaker 3: 1:13:39

Yeah. So I think as long as you, you know, pay attention and that like already this mom is asking the question, so she's already like very vigilant about you know how her attachment to her child's going to be or how you know her child's going to develop in this world, so I think already that's a great, you know, prospect for the child in general being in this amazing home. And I think it's just important to realize that, like Dr Bruce Perry says, like you can rupture something. So, for example, not be so present in the beginning stages of your child's life and just repair that. He mentioned just being present with your kid, taking your kid to the grocery store with you and asking them to pick something off the shelf. These are moments of connection that can repair any sort of disattachment that you might have with your child that can repair any sort of disattachment that you might have with your child.

Speaker 2: 1:14:30

And I think it comes back to a question that is often asked where they say, like, okay, stress is not good for a child not in all cases, as we had this conversation with him but then what's the range Like? What is bad and how bad is it and how often does it have to happen? You know, when it comes to sleep training, for example, parents will often ask me is sleep training bad or good? Is it damaging my child? Are they, you know, is this something that's going to impact them until they're adults?

Speaker 2: 1:14:52

But from what he said, there's, even if a child experiences something more traumatic, there are ways to fix it and to help that child through connectedness and through being part of that community. So it's back to that rupture. You know there's something that happened to you as a child. Then repair work on the repair part and we don't have to worry about such little things. You know, like, sometimes I'll get emails from a mom who says I had to go to the bathroom and my child cried for like 10 minutes or five minutes or whatever it was, and they feel guilty and we do. I experienced it myself too, with my first child. It's like you never want to disconnect yourself. But now I think from what I learned from him is those little moments don't matter, there's a rupture, repair and that's okay. Show your child that they're still safe and there's security in that environment.

Speaker 3: 1:15:39

Yeah, and a big point that he brought up too is like, if something bad does happen like, for example, you're fighting in front of your kid or you had to, you know, go to the bathroom while they're crying you just come back and say, oh sorry, I had to go to the washroom and mom needed to take care of herself. You know, like that's important too. What can I help you with? Now, you know, like you're able to have this dialogue with your child yeah, Maybe they're not going to understand every word you're saying if they're a two-year-old, but just, you know, as they age, you're going to be more accustomed to this back and forth dialogue of okay, something ruptured, how do we repair it together?

Speaker 2: 1:16:13

And your communication, your body language, your tone is very different, right, when you're calmer, and you're so, even if you just show them like I'm calm now, everything's okay, you're safe, I'm safe, it's fine Just to have those conversations. It's interesting we were before. We were discussing like three points and that's what stood out to us. You know, that community connection part, that rupture and repair, but also that it's not like it's not the parents' fault. We put so much pressure on ourselves and to me it just. I hope parents that are listening, and all of you listening, realize that, like we're not, we cannot control every single aspect of our child's life, but we can be present as much as we can when we can with them and that does help nurture that resilience part too. That resilience part, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 1:17:01

I think it's a systemic problem that we have, in a sense that our society does not support new families. Our society does not provide enough universal basic income. There are so many studies that show you give every person an amount of money it doesn't have to be a huge amount of money either, and it cuts costs on healthcare. It cuts costs on mental healthcare. It cuts costs on basically any negative aspect that we have in society. There's studies on this and, like Dr Perry was saying, it's systemic change over generations. So it's not. I want to reiterate what you said. It's not a parent's fault if they can't handle everything that's coming their way. There's just so many things we need to balance as humans, and then you have a life of a child on your hands as well. He said everyone's burnt out. It's something we know and we're trying to change it, but it's a systemic problem.

Speaker 2: 1:17:59

Be an advocate, not just for your child. So if they're in the system at school and you know that it's a dysregulation issue and you know that they need a bit more support when it comes to their emotions, just be the advocate for them. You know the research you're following Kirstner on and you've heard all the studies that we share and we'll share some of the notes as well for you to have. But Dr Perry's work, his books, everything just reminds us that we do have to think about our system, even as our nervous system, even as parents. You know, if you've been yelling a lot, it's not that there's something wrong with you. I don't want you to fall into this guilt sort of cycle, but just start thinking about where that's coming from.

Speaker 2: 1:18:34

Why is that happening? And that's something I had learned. I have this super hypersensitive and actually we didn't talk to him about that but this hypersensitive stress system where you know you drop a pencil, I jump. But it came from. Now I understand it came from how I was raised and the anxiety that was an environment from a very young age and I brought that on and I react very differently than, let's say, my partner, my husband. But now we understand that it's just because of our upbringing and it's okay. It doesn't mean that we're damaged for life. But understanding your own system really helps you when you're parenting, because then you could I know. Now for myself I need to take deep breaths before reacting to my child, and that's why I share this kind of research. You know like we have to understand our nervous system.

Speaker 3: 1:19:18

And Dr Perry actually brought it up right Is that you have to regulate yourself before you can regulate your kid, and it just made me think of Wonder Grade. I was like, wow, we have something for this. Yeah, it's true. Yes, I was like there's something that exists already.

Speaker 2: 1:19:32

Exactly, and that's why I often talk with Christy. I actually want to bring on the podcast, but we have all these systems that talk about mindfulness and for kids, kids, and here are some books for kids and some stuffed animals that will calm them down, but nobody says you as a parent have a role in this, a really, really big role. So what we're doing is we're putting all these again band-aids on on a child who's dysregulated and we're saying just breathe and everything will be fine. But there's so much more to that. And if the parent is in the home and environment and they're dysregulated but they're trying to teach their child to regulate themselves, it's, it's, it's going again, it's head-butting, you know of trying to change things. So we do it's hard. It's so hard as a parent we have enough on our hands and then you hear this thing of like work on yourself. It's like, well, I don't want to because I'm tired and but it's little baby steps.

Speaker 2: 1:20:22

I had started with journaling and noticing what I responded to and how I responded to certain things, and just that was an eye opener. It's like oh okay, I'm sensitive to and I think I've spoken about this before but I'm sensitive to certain noises, or noise by 4 or 5 pm. My system gets dysregulated very easily with the noise or like lots of hugging. By the end of the day I'm like, oh okay, I need my space, and just being aware of that changes how I'm responding. So I think we do need to keep having this conversation and be an advocate for your child and for yourself. If you need a break, find a way to get a break. Don't let anyone lead you to believe that it's selfish, and I'm so glad we had that discussion with him.

Speaker 3: 1:21:02

Yeah, there's no shame in taking time for yourself and regulating yourself, and like that's almost more important than trying to figure out how to regulate your kid. If you're not regulated, you can't regulate your kid. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:21:14

Yeah, I'm curious before we we end this, this was a longer episode but it was just too good. I loved this conversation so much I'm literally I don't think I'll sleep tonight. But the. I loved this conversation so much I'm literally I don't think I'll sleep tonight. But the. You know I'm curious with your own research and what we learned from him and you. You've read his books and his research, like I have. What do you use from his work and research in your own research or is there anything that, like has informed you or helped you do or think about something differently?

Speaker 3: 1:21:41

Yeah, so, um, I work on post-mortem human brain so I can't take it word for word what he's saying and use it in my own research. But one thing I find that his work specifically has really helped me with is when I go present my research and the topic of child abuse is out there in the public, I always get people that come and say like, am I too late? Can I still fix myself? I experienced this as a child, you know. They tell me their, their heartaches and and their, their trauma from being a child and they say how can what? What do I do?

Speaker 3: 1:22:13

Like I've tried antidepressants, they're not working. I've tried this treatment, that treatment. It's not working. My therapist doesn't believe me that it's, you know, not ADHD or something like that. How do I deal with this? And I'm like, honestly, I'm not. I'm not able to answer your question specifically, but I really suggest you look into Dr Bruce Perry's work and the neuro-sequential model, which we didn't touch too much on today, but it basically is just going back to the basics, like that layered cake that he was talking about, is trying to figure out what's going on in the bottom layer, in the brainstem, in the regulatory system of our body, what's going on there and how can we then fix that and recuperate the damage and then move on to higher functioning, like you know, sitting in class and listening. So that's kind of how his work has impacted mine is just being able to communicate with the general public honestly and people who share their stories.

Speaker 2: 1:23:08

Because he's broken it down. I know he said scientists or neuroscientists wouldn't like his layer cake.

Speaker 3: 1:23:13

I love it.

Speaker 2: 1:23:14

But I actually exactly, because I think we always have to take complex, you know, neuroscientific topics and try to find a way that it makes sense to everyone. And that's a perfect example. I was looking at that image last night of his model and it just makes sense. If we look at her child, who's dysregulated, screaming and crying, and we're like this doesn't make sense. Or look, you asked for the red cup and now you're crying or or trying to reason with them, in that moment there's no point.

Speaker 2: 1:23:42

So if we just realize that there's like this three-layered system and that we have to get to their like sensory system or just trying to regulate them at the core, and then that goes to the emotion part of the brain and that goes to the cortex and rational thinking, then we could just visualize or we see our child very differently. Now we understand why they're not listening to us, because they can't reason or ration in that moment. It's just to them. They're emotional and they're upset and dysregulated and that's it. It makes sense to their system. Um, but really, really being aware of all that, I think is just. I, all new parents have to know this.

Speaker 2: 1:24:14

I'm so happy we had this conversation thanks for having me, thanks for joining me yes, thank you for joining me and and thank you to everyone who's listening. Please take a moment. You have to now. You have no choice but to rate the Curious Neuron podcast, because this was an amazing episode. Please rate it and leave a review, and don't forget to send me an email at info at curiousneuroncom. Follow us on Instagram at curious underscore neuron. We're also on Facebook with the same handle and you can now follow us on YouTube. This video, if you're listening on the podcast, either on iTunes or Spotify or Amazon Music, you can watch this video on YouTube as well, and I think that's all. I think. You can also visit the website kirstenroncom and we will see you next week. Bye, thank you.