What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Oprah Winfrey and Dr Bruce Perry

CRAIG

Hello, and welcome to Desperately Seeking Wisdom, with me, Craig Oliver. This is a podcast for people who want to live a simpler, more fulfilled life, but aren’t sure how to get there. A little while back I hit the buffers, and I decided to look for a different, better way of living. So, for Desperately Seeking Wisdom, I’ve been talking to some wise people. People who’ve managed to change or have had change forced upon them. What was the wisdom that got them through it? What would they say that would help others, who like me, were struggling?

BRUCE

It's just easier to be empathic with somebody if you know their story. It's very rare that you're gonna hear a person’s story, and then look at them in the present moment and go, ‘Wow, you're just garbage’.

CRAIG

Joining me today is Dr. Bruce Perry. One of the world’s leading experts on trauma, he has appeared in several documentaries with Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry, talking about mental health. His big insight is that for too long the world has been asking the wrong question about people - What’s wrong with you? Instead we need to ask - What happened to you? As you’ll hear - that simple reframing could make a major difference to all our lives.

So, along with all of that work, you've also built up a partnership with one of the most famous people on earth, Oprah Winfrey, and you've done her show a lot of times, you've written a book with her recently. How did that come about?

BRUCE

We kind of both have, we have two different versions of this. [LAUGHS] Course, Oprah's version is gonna win, so - but my recollection, I was, ah, working as a consultant to a centre for boys who were in the child welfare system. On the board of this organisation was a gentleman who knew Oprah, and he got to know a little bit about my work and what I was doing. And that year - this is many, many, many years ago, like 34 years ago, she finally went public with the fact that she had been abused herself.

And in typical Oprah fashion, she wanted to solve that problem. So she was gonna convene all of the great thinkers, and all of the powerful people in the, in this field and bring them to Washington, DC, and they were gonna solve the problem. You know, they were gonna, you know, ‘I’m gonna put you in a room until you come up with a solution’. So somebody called me in my lab when I was working and said, ‘Oprah Winfrey wants to talk to you’ and I'm like, ‘Yeah, right’.

So, [LAUGHS] I, I j- I thought it was a friend pranking me, so I hung up. And, er, and somebody else called back and ultimately, I ended up talking with her business partner, who helped found Harpo Studios with her. And he said, ‘You know, Oprah is having this big meeting, and, er, wants you to come to this’ and… I, you know, I, I'm not exactly sure why I did. I think it's because I was just tired and burned out, and I just, I just said, I said, ‘I - no, I'm not gonna go’. I, I knew that I would just sit there as a j- I was a, I was a young junior faculty member, I had no power, I had no influence.

And I knew everybody’d be scrambling for her money and I just was like, you know, I'm just gonna get trampled in the dust. So I said, ‘No, thank you very much, I'm not gonna come’. And then I got a call back. It, it was Oprah and she's like, ‘Well, why - why don't you wanna go?’ I, you know, I'm just a junior faculty doing this research, and, er, you're gonna have all kinds of people that are gonna talk to you about their model and what they wanna do and I just, I had nothing, you know. [LAUGHS

And she said, ‘Okay, thank you very much’, hung up. Turns out she cancelled the whole thing and two weeks later, she called me up and asked me to come to her farm, er, her farm in Indiana and spend the day talking with her and two other people about all of this stuff, and so that's where we met.

CRAIG

I imagine she's not used to people saying no to her.

BRUCE

Well, I - that may not have been it, I th- you know, part of what I think that Oprah’s, anybody who's famous, the dilemma they have is there's a weird gravitational pull to famous people, and so even people that are pretty steady and stable and accomplished in their own right, when they get close to that gravitational pole, they, they get distorted. They act differently, they think differently, and, and I, I probably do, too, but at that time, I had been up all night and I had been doing a res- an experiment and I was like, too tired to even give a shit.

I just was like, I think that's what it was. I mean, you know, I'm, I’m not putting myself up as like any [No] you know, abnormal person, and...

CRAIG

No, I mean, and that's one thing that really comes across like, reading and talking to you, um, is that you have this extraordinary scientific ability, but there's also real empathy there, and you seem to have this ability to look at people and understand what's going on, what makes them tick, why they're behaving in the way they are. I just wonder, where does that empathy come from?

BRUCE

You know, it’s interesting. I don't really know. I mean, I - but I do - I remember from the time I was little that I was very, very shy and as a result, I would - it's not that I wouldn't join in, but I spent a lot of time watching other people's behaviours and seeing how people responded. So my grandmother used to say, you know, who used to take care of me once in a while, said that I would sit - I would sit quietly and it - well, she remembers one time when she was busy getting all the other kids food and I was into my highchair.

And she looked over and I hadn't been given any food, so - but I hadn't squawked or hadn't done anything, I was just sort of sitting there watching and she thought it was like the strangest little thing, that you were just this sweet little boy and you just watched and never complained. Which now, I wasn't a sweet little boy. I mean, I, I got in trouble at schools, but I think mostly it came from being an observer.

CRAIG

You spend a lot of time, um, looking at people who've had difficult backgrounds or issues. Did you have a happy childhood? Were you, did you feel loved and secure in that?

BRUCE

Yeah, I did. I was very fortunate, I lived in the same community all the way through high school. Er, my next door neighbour, you know, from the time we were three, we were best friends, still are to this day. So there's a tremendous amount of sort of community stability, family stability. Um, you know, my parents weren't perfect, but they were, you know, they're pretty good parents. I was just lucky. [Yeah] I think, again, I really think I, I don't know if you know much about writing but all of the Southern writers in the US, there's not a lot to do except observe, you know, you sit and watch. And the people who are really good observers can become really good writers, and they d- you know, the - you have to have some capacity for empathy to be a good novelist.

CRAIG

But there’s - I, I think that, that's, that’s so often right but there's also has to sometimes be, you know, a willingness to put yourself second or - and see other [Yeah] people and some people struggle to put themselves [Yeah] second, and some people are very good [You’re right] at looking at another person and saying, what's going on with you?

BRUCE

Yeah. You know, s- as I think about it as we're talking, I hadn't really thought about this but I think one of the things that contributed to me sort of having this capacity to be empathic was that I had really bad childhood asthma and I was hospitalised a lot when I was a little kid. And they used to put me in like a, this oxygen tent and this was back in the day when parents couldn't stay in the hospital with their kids. And so I, you know, I had these moments where - or not moments but I'd have these attacks where I’d be up all night, all by myself breathing. Er, and I don't know if you - when you have asthma, you literally feel like you're drowning.

CRAIG

But it must be quite lonely and frightening to be in that situation. Your parents aren't there, you're in this - all this medical equipment around you. That must have been quite lonely and frightening, you know?

BRUCE

Yeah, I think it was, I think - I mean, I - the, the elements that I remember of it, I think it was, you know, I, I didn't feel unsafe. It, it was lonely, it was anxious, and I remember hearing my dad's footsteps coming down the hallway when, you know, he - the visiting hours, it - like two hours he’d come and visit and he’d, er, I remember his specific walk I could identify. So, obviously, I was sitting there waiting for it.

CRAIG

You're, you're a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist, so it seems to me that you know how the brain works, but also what makes a person tick. Is it a rare combination to have both?

BRUCE

Well, when I was younger, it was pretty rare, but I, I think more and more people who are going into mental health or psychiatry, psychology are learning about the brain, so I think it's, it's, it's more common.

CRAIG

And it feels to me that thing about actually understanding, how does the brain work and operate, also has an impact on our psychology.

BRUCE

Absolutely, you know, and it - you know, I'm always a little bit cautionary about, you know, my understanding of the brain. Just to be clear, we probably know one, one-thousandth, er, about the brain that we will ultimately know. So we may know some really important things about how the brain works and how it changes, but we're, we’re really, you know, with regards to our understanding the brain, it's kind of in its infancy.

The neuroscience is, is in a, a field that’s just literally exploding. I, you know, they’re - it, it's become so active as an area of investigation that the field itself had to invent an, a subfield to manage the information. So there's a field called neuro informatics, which is just how to manage all of the new information about the brain, and so the complexities are honestly, just kind of mind boggling. It's a little bit like looking at the stars on a, on a clear summer's night, you, you just see billions of stars and you contemplate, you know, your place in the universe. That's kind of what happens when you're a neuroscientist and you look at this emerging body of information, it's just, er, almost paralysing.

CRAIG

It's almost an impossible question, but very basically, where are we then, in terms of understanding how it operates? I think what - I was listening and reading your book recently, and you know, you were say-saying that there are three basic stages of it. Can you unpack that a little bit?

BRUCE

Well, er, a little bit. I mean, you know, one of the things that we have to do if you're, if you're studying the neurosciences and then you're trying to communicate t o, er, people about the brain and what you know about the brain, you always have to oversimplify. So, you know, it's, there's always a payoff, if - is this gonna be clear enough for somebody to understand?

A lot of times, ma- when you do make it clear, you make it too simple, which sort of, you - then you lose some of the nuance and some of the richness. But in general, what we found is that if you think about the human brain as this upside down triangle, and at the top are the base, so to speak, the top of this image is the, the cortex, the part of our brain that's most uniquely human.

Er, and then you kind of go down through other parts of the brain to the lowest part of the brain, which is the brainstem, you can get some idea of just the, the fundamental hierarchy of organisation in the brain, and knowing that, in and, in and of itself is really important, because one of the - one of the most really useful pieces of information about the brain that everybody can learn, we teach this to kids that are in, you know, first grade, second grade, is that all of your sensory input, what you see, hear, feel and everything else, it doesn't go straight to the smart part of your brain.

It has to come through the lower parts of your brain that are actually n-not as smart, they're not as, they're pretty primitive. And a lot of times, that'll get us in trouble. And it, you know, classic example of this is your first impression. You know, you’ll come into an interaction with somebody and, and a few things will happen, and, and without even really being aware of it, your brain will form an opinion of that person and sometimes it's wrong.

CRAIG

And can that processing be set up wrong? So you've done a lot of stuff about, um, the impact of abuse or behaviours on very, very young children. Are you saying basically that that processing is A) quite unsophisticated, but B) can also be set on the wrong path?

BRUCE

Absolutely correct. That's, you know, that's one of the most important things about understanding human beings is that as we develop from the moment of conception in utero, and then, as very, very young infants, our brain is trying to make sense out of the world, and, and the major tool it uses is to create what we call associations.

So, you connect a sight and a sound and you connect, er, a, a gesture and an, an emotional tone, and so your brain is just trying to figure out the world. So you create all of these internal, er, if you will, memories of what the world is, and sometimes if your world is characterised by early life experiences that are skewed one way or the other, your brain thinks the whole world is that way.

So for example, let's say your, your mother was depressed and overwhelmed, her ability to be very responsive and immediately responsive to your needs would be impaired. So your brain is using your interactions with her to create your worldview about people.

CRAIG

That can be something that has an impact 10, 20, 30, 40 years later and you're maybe not even aware of it.

BRUCE

Exactly. And so as you get a little bit older, you know, by the time you're a year old, your brain i-i- the majority of your experiences with people have been with your mom who's been depressed and disengaged, and episodically there and sometimes not there, and, and so your brain really categorises the next person you meet that h- with attributes like your mom, as being someone you can't trust, you just don't depend on this person.

And you can get to the point where you're 12, 28, 50 and your brain still categorises people the way you first learned to categorise people when you're an infant. And this is also the origin of kind of the biology of implicit bias. You know, your worldview is formed by these early experiences. When you run into people who don't look like you, the default response of your brain is to go, ‘Oh, you're different’ and, and when your brain sees incoming input that's different, the default reaction is to activate your stress response and to kind of be a little bit wary and defensive of that person. Y-your brain doesn't like things that are different.

CRAIG

So we're gonna unpack a lot of that, um, later on, but I just wanted to start off a bit talking about, you know, you're incredibly famous for your work. I was looking at your CV, and you've done some amazing scientific research and psychiatric research, but also, you've been there at big moments of trauma in American history, so, you know, Sandy Hook, 911, Columbine, dealing with the aftermath of those things. Can you tell us a little bit about your experiences of dealing with those things, what you learned and what came across?

BRUCE

One of the things that we see again, and again, and again, and again, is that the people who are in the community who are most impacted by the, you know, the, the disaster or the violent act, are being asked to continue to be leaders and so- and demonstrate flexibility. You know, they're being asked to be abstract and do really advanced planning and of course, they're being asked to do that when they themselves are under extreme duress.

And so their planning capabilities are compromised. One of the things that we talk about is state dependent functioning, and, and basically, what we're referring to is that when somebody’s hungry, thirsty, cold, threatened, they start to shut down the smart part of their brain. And so here are these leaders in, in these big, catastrophic situations who are being asked to be creative, flexible, innovative, all of these things that are quite difficult to do, even when everything's going well, but they're being asked to do it under duress. So a lot of their decision making is very flawed.

CRAIG

It's so fascinating hear- hearing you say that, because basically, you're saying that somebody making a very important decision or deciding how things are ordered and how things should go, it may be something as simple as they're hungry or cold, or thirsty, that is having an impact on them, or something happened to them many, many years ago that’s skewing their decisions and the way in which they think about things.

BRUCE

A-absolutely. There's some fascinating research about this, and, and I think anybody who's sort of lived through the last 18 months with COVID, there'll be times when you look at the decisions made by people in leadership, and you go, ‘What the hell was that? What - what are you thinking?’ We, I think if people start to understand a little bit about state dependent functioning, you can look around your workplace, you can look at yourself, and you can find all kinds of examples of where, wow, yeah, that's right, I was under a lot of stress. That was really stupid, wasn't it? We all do it.

CRAIG

So I wanna jump to what I think is your great insight and a piece of wisdom, I'd say, is, um, you were saying we shouldn't be asking what's wrong with you, but what happened to you? And in other words, if we understood the impact of formative often traumatic experiences on people, we'd be able to help more and see the world better. How did you arrive at that conclusion that that is the real question? It's almost like that is the key to unlocking understanding people and maybe helping them.

BRUCE

Well, Craig, er, you know, I think that - that question is, for me, linked to my interest in history. Um, when I was growing up, I was, you know, I was - I observed, people. I grew up hunting and fishing, I was a really, you know, you learn to be very patient and observe animal behaviour. And as I learned to read, I became fascinated by history, so I wanted to be a history teacher.

And so I read history, history, history, and so it was literally ingrained into me that if you wanna understand the current situation, you have to know how the different parties came to this event, whether it's a battle or some confrontation. And then I was just really, really lucky to have a freshman advisor at Stanford, who was a developmental endocrinologist and he was the, the person who discovered that a tiny little bit of h- of stress to a little rat pup would change that rat pup’s brain as an adult.

And so from the time I was a-any form of academic, I was aware of the fact that early experiences can change the biology of the brain, and, and so when I started to do clinical work, I would see kids come in, and they would be impulsive and high, have high resting heart rates, and they would eat all kinds of food, but they could - wouldn't gain weight. And in my brain, I'm thinking about what happened that your metabolic rate is so different? That your cardiovascular system has changed?

And I would start to think about the research I was doing on animal models with early handling stress and changing the physiology of those systems. But the, the clinicians I was with, were just going, ‘Alright, does he have inattention? Does he have impulsivity? Does he have social problems? He has ADHD’. And I'm like, ‘Well, not really’. I mean, there's a lot of different ways to get to - there’s a lot of different trajectories to being inattentive. You know, so, so why don't we figure out which one it is? That'll help us be better at trying to figure out how to treat it.

CRAIG

When I was reading the book, um, ‘What Happened to You?’ um, I thought, this is such a great insight in terms of understanding how things worked, and how might our history have been just dist- different, and how might our futures be different if people had thought like that, for a long time. How many arguments and rows and un- misunderstandings could have been set to one side, if we'd been much better at looking at people and thinking, ‘There's a reason why this is that way and that helps me understand better’?

BRUCE

I, I really do think that these concepts have relevance for interpers- you know, solving interpersonal conflicts, but they also have relevance for foreign policy, you know? Er, you know, if you really begin to take that frame of reference, for problem solving of all sorts, I think it opens new avenues and, um, it, it's just easier to be empathic with somebody if you know their story. It's, it's very rare that you're gonna hear a person’s story and then look at them in the present moment and go, ‘Wow, you're just garbage’. Um, it’s very rare.

CRAIG

Another big insight in the book is that, you know, we have this deep longing to be loved and validated, and if that need isn't met, particularly in childhood, we see people self-sabotaging, having strings of failed relationships. They can become promiscuous, violent, addicted. But it also seems to me that it's not necessarily as huge as that all the time. So you see people who are controlling, workaholics, shopaholics, TV addicts, you name it, that, that there is that sense of people trying to fill that hole that got created because of the way in which things happened to them so long ago.

BRUCE

So true. So true. I mean, I, I just finished, um, reviewing a book by, er, Dr Galit Atlas, it's a wonderful book, it's gonna come out pretty soon, but it really - she's looking at, er, and writes about transgenerational trauma, and, and she's looking at these more subtle things, Craig, that you're talking about, that you just your - you - the subtlest way that you interact with somebody and sabotage moments of intimacy.

Or you have a difficult time managing success at work, and you find yourself doing something that everybody at work, who thought, ‘Wow, we were gonna promote Craig, but now there he goes again’ [LAUGHS] he just - and so we do th- there's all kinds of things about our behaviour that have their antecedents in our, in our developmental experiences.

CRAIG

So why self-sabotage, um, in relationships or at work or whatever? Why because you weren't getting what you needed, or there was a frustration or difficulties earlier, why does it result in that kind of negative behaviour that can just, as you say, be seen so easily by other people, but not the person themselves?

BRUCE

Well, again, one of the things that, that I've learned over the years is it's, there's usually multiple pathways, right? There's multiple versions of why somebody might do self-sabotage, and one of the most common that I've seen is that whenever you grow, you, you have to experience discomfort, and you know, some people just get tired of being on - they just don't want it anymore.

You know, they don't wanna travel. They want their little routines. It feels safe and comfortable. And they're just, they don't want anymore, and now that may be because in the past, they've had so much uncontrollable stuff happened to them, where they've just felt run over by a truck, and they're so risk aversive, or they're so change aversive that they don't want even small, positive changes.

So that - I - that - I see that a lot. And then they get to some point of equilibrium. So for example, let's say they have tremendous potential, but they get a comfortable little job, and their supervisor sees, ‘Wow, you got a lot of potential, you'd be good at this’, and wants to help them get to that next step. And that's when they'll self- that's when they'll sabotage. They'll sabotage to stay in that equilibrium.

CRAIG

And it doesn't have to be necessarily that that child was obviously physically or sexually or am- abused. It may be that they live in a home where they're provided for with food and clothing and whatever, but they're not just necessarily getting the emotional support they need.

BRUCE

Absolutely.

CRAIG

So, so, it - I mean, is, is this then an epidemic? [LAUGHS]

BRUCE

It's interesting. I wr- er, I wrote a, a book a number of years ago with a colleague of mine, really wonderful woman, Maya Salivates, a great science writer, and the book was about empathy. And one of the things that we talked about is that this capability to, to be connected to other people, and caring, and, um, really have this capacity, is a product of experience.

And, and like any experience, any brain-related, er, capability, it's changeable with repetition. So the more you practice your piano, the more the neurobiology of piano playing gets built and stronger and better. Er, the more you practice your vocabulary words, the more, you know, you'll have, understand those words.

And the more you have relational opportunities for conversation, social interactions, opportunities to see what worked and what didn't work in a group, the more you build your empathic skills, your relational skills. But the modern world is very relationally different from the way our species evolved, so many of us spend 10, 12 hours in front of a screen.

Um, the number of real conversational interactions we have are, are diminishing. Children will grow up in households where they're the only child, and then they'll go to schools where there's 30 other kids in a classroom, so the amount of sort of individual adult to child interactions are shrinking, and so all of these things influence the development of the systems in our brain that are involved in forming and maintaining relationships.

So I, I do think that - I don't know whether I’d call it an epidemic, but I think that we are at risk. As [Right] in the Western world, we're at risk for depression, anxiety, and reward related problems. All of these systems in the brain are intimately connected to our social neurobiology. So when you're in a group where you feel like you belong, and you have many, many opportunities for interacting and, and getting a smile, and getting a pat on the back, and having somebody discipline you or redirect you, or teach you, you have these opportunities that will keep your mood-related systems well regulated, your reward systems in your brain pretty well quenched.

You know, o- the systems that are related to stress and distress will be better regulated, so you're less vulnerable to anxiety, depression and substance use problems. But as soon as that social fabric frays, and we've seen it during COVID, the number of people that are struggling with anxiety, depression and substance use issues has gone up as we've become more socially fragmented, and connection is harder to maintain.

CRAIG

You say that people are constantly trying to refill their reward bucket, so just following on from what you're saying there, what does that mean?

BRUCE

Well, it's interesting if you - and again, I don't want to make this too much of a biology lecture, but there are systems in the brains of animals, all animals, that are going to make you feel reward or pleasure when you do something that will promote your health, do something that's gonna keep you so- socially engaged so that you're safe, you're part of the group. That's related to keeping you alive.

And then there's systems that will make you feel uncomfortable or distressed when you're doing something or - that's potentially threatening to you, your health or your survival. And so, then those other stress response systems make you feel distressed, so anxiety is connected to this yin yang of reward regulation.

So what we know is that there are ways to, many ways to get a little bit of reward. Some of them are healthy and some of them are not so healthy. So, we, we have this interesting vestigial tail, we have this interesting part of us, that gets pleasure from eating foods that are salty, fatty, you know, sweet, because our species didn't used to be able to carry calories. The only place we could carry calories was on our body.

Even before - you know, we as a species existed before we had mastered fire, where we could basically preserve food and carry calories. And so when we run into something where there's f- a lot of fat, it was in our best interest as - to eat it, eat everything and get gorged.

CRAIG

I don’t know, I don’t know if I'm gonna get this right, but it seems to me that there's an emotional equivalent of high fat, sugar and salt foods that, you know, there are certain emotions that have an equivalence to those, so people sort of gorge on them, but actually, they're profoundly unhealthy for them and there's just something in there, something the wiring got wrong, or, or something like that. Is that making sense?

BRUCE

Er, absolutely. Junk food, social interactions, right? That are, um, they’re empty social interactions. Er, honestly, I think that - and, I, I, this is maybe not fair, I know people go insane about this, but I think to some degree, likes on Twitter, and sort of having 10,000 Friends, none of whom you know, that's kind of that, ‘Oh, man, look at that, they liked it. So and so liked it’. You don't even know that person. That's kind of this hollow eff- it's an effort to kind of be connected, and because I think there's a longing to belong, a longing to, to be connected, but I don't think that that's a quenching social interaction.

CRAIG

And does that, it seems to happen to a lot of people in terms of relationships that are not necessarily good for them, too.

BRUCE

Exactly. Right.

CRAIG

So you say that people elicit what they project into the world, um, and that seems to me that you're saying that a lot of people's brains are set up to expect certain things, and those things may be positive, or they may expect the world to be negative. Um, but can you explain how that works, particularly with people who expect negativity, or don't expect things to work? I mean, you talk about people feeling that they don't deserve love, or that they're not worthwhile.

BRUCE

Yeah, the one of the really interesting things about the human brain is it's got this capacity for anticipating the future. You've got your worldview, you know, you, you think that the world works a certain way, and that makes you feel safe. But then you use that worldview as you go into the next moment, or the next meeting, or the next part of your day, and your brain is anticipating outcomes.

You're anticipating that when you go into the meeting, you're gonna see people and they'll smile at you, and whether you're consciously wherever or not, your brain’s really waiting for what you have anticipated to become, to come true. And so when it does come true, you feel pleasurable. That's one of the indirect routes to the systems in your brain involved in reward. So one of the most common ways that people actually feel safe, and regulated, and rewarded is that they go into an interaction where they get what they have anticipated.

CRAIG

Is it anticipates and wants? So almost that you want it to be negative, sometimes?

BRUCE

The irony is that a lot of times, if your worldview is that you're going to be rejected, you go into a meeting and you just wait for the person to say something that is sexist, and as soon as somebody sort of makes this slightest sexist comment, your brain goes, ‘See? This organisation is sexist’.

CRAIG

So it's a kind of confirmation bias?

BRUCE

Right. It’s - you would rather be right about your worldview, than have a pleasant experience with somebody, than be pleasantly surprised that, ‘Oh, you aren't a racist, you aren't a sexist, you aren't a misogynist’.

CRAIG

See, this feels just incredibly wise to me, and a great explanation of why things are the way they are, but I suppose my next question is, how do you keep it as an explanation and stop it being an excuse? In other words, [Right] when are people responsible for their actions, because a lot of people who were damaged themselves end up damaging others, or have behaviour patterns that are negative and difficult. So can it become a bit of an excuse for bad behaviour? And people really need to take responsibility as well?

BRUCE

The whole area about the difference between being able to explain why something happens and then having that be an excuse for allowing it to happen, er, it needs to always be l- carefully looked at, and I - we run into this all the time when it comes to criminal, criminality. But I think it's - one of the key things about this is that if a person is able to have a moment of insight, or they see that they've been repeating these patterns, and then they connect, can connect it to s- to something in their past, they start to see actionable elements to that.

This is kind of what happens in good, when people get good therapy, or they have really patient friends, [LAUGHS] you know. I mean, every once in a while a friend will tell you the truth and, er, you know, and for a while, you, you know, and you get pissed off, and then you realise, well, maybe they're sure - that's right, and...

At some point, if you are lucky enough to have somebody who cares enough about you to help you point out where you're repeating these things, and it's really in the, in the long run, it's in your, not in your best interest.

CRAIG

So this podcast was borne out of a realisation that lots of people often feel stuck in their lives and they kind of feel like they were told, if they behaved in certain ways, everything would work out. So if you work hard enough, you know, you'll, you'll thrive, or there is a person out there who will completely fulfil you. And then they end up in a position where they kind of think, ‘Well, that didn't work but I was told it would’, and they want to change. Um, but they don't really know how to, or what the tips are. I wondered if we could try and get a bit more practical, if like, if people are in that position, what are the tips that you would give?

BRUCE

You know, I think one of the most useful pieces of information is for people to kind of slow down and spend a little bit of time reflecting on who in their life is available to kind of be part of their sort of family of choice, their community of choice. And what we find is that there's a relationship between the density of connectedness.

In other words, if you've got a lot of people, your, your life, you're lucky enough to have a life rich in uncles and aunties, and cousins and friends, that it's easier to heal from all kinds of things, but if you have a life of kind of relational poverty, that's a very, very tough place to be.

CRAIG

So what do you do if you're in the latter category?

BRUCE

That's where you do this inventory. How, how do I build community for myself? How do I connect to people? And, and, you know, depending upon where you live, there are going to be other people like you. You know, there are gonna be people that like, if, if, if you like needlepoint, or if you like to read, or whatever it is, find something that gives you pleasure, that - where you feel safe and you f- your niche, what is your niche?

And, and then look for people who can become part of your world. It's a very, it's, you know, and it's easy for me to say that; it's hard to do. You know, particularly when so much of our adult world is, is transient and impermanent, you know. In the US, it's amazing, you look at a k- a block, and particularly with young adults, where, where they tend to live, you'll see over the course of a two year period, you'll see a 30 percent, 40 percent turnover. And so, people move, people get disconnected by work. People get disconnected, they get away from their extended families. So - but I really do think that all healing is related to connection.

CRAIG

Interesting. There's a sense that comes through in your book, um, that it's almost impossible to be truly wise without some form of adversity. I think you almost talk about the wisdom of trauma as well, if I remember right. Do [Yeah] you believe that's true, that people need some form of trauma to actually have wisdom about life?

BRUCE

I don't know that you need to have trauma, but in order to grow, you need distress, and I think in order to be wise, you need to, to have somebody kick you out of your comfort zone. And so getting kicked out of your comfort zone usually involves distress, or losing a job, or being marginalised or humiliated, or having a natural disaster, or grieving the loss of a loved - I mean, life is filled with things that kick you out of your comfort zone, and once you learn that it's okay out there, that's where wisdom comes from. You start to look at what is important.

CRAIG

And I think so much - this was explained to me, you know, by trying to shift perspective and stop life being seen as a grind, or feeling it's a grind and seeing it more as a gift, and also seeing that some of the adversity may have actually strengthened you, and the example this person gave me was that they did an, they did an experiment on moths and butterflies.

And when they were in a kind of chrysalis, they got a scalpel and cut it open, sort of helped the moth or the butterfly out, and the ones that they'd helped out, who hadn't struggled, couldn't fly. And it struck me as quite an interesting metaphor for life. It's like, in a way, you need to push against something, or you need something, you know, light needs darkness to be properly understood, that sort of thing.

BRUCE

Well, resilience, the ability to sort of manage stressors and, you know, in a good way, is the product of moderate stressor. You know, stress is actually good for you. It's, it's, it's what makes you stronger in, in a lot of these systems in your body and brain. I think people talk about stress the wrong way. A lot of people talk about it like it's this big negative. I think it's important to embrace stress. Um, but the key is that, the, the pattern. You know the elements of controllability and predictability, um, make stressors something that can make you stronger.

CRAIG

Yeah, and we - and there's a sort of sense in which a lot of people spend their lives catastrophising as well, don’t they? You know, the - what are all the wrong things that can happen? And I think it's Eckhart Tolle who says, you know, 99.9 percent of times, nothing does go wrong, so why are you putting so much energy and effort into thinking it might?

BRUCE

Yeah. Well, again I think it goes back to what we talked about right at the beginning, is that if your worldview is that in the beginning, your w- your life was unpredictable, your brain is looking for those negative things. It's, it's an, you know, we talked about your brain has sort of got a worldview, and so if you're out there anticipating negative things are going to happen, your brain will look for them.

And so all the 99 percent of things that are good that are happening, your brain goes, ‘Whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. See? Oh, here's that bad thing’. And we all know people like that. [Yeah] And then there's people that are the other way, right? They'll have all kinds of bad things happening, happening, they're poor and they don't have a job. They go, ‘But you know what? Look how beautiful this weather is today. Isn't it gorgeous? Smell that air’.

CRAIG

[LAUGHS] There - here’s another literary quote for you. Um, the writer Frank McCourt wrote in ‘Angela's Ashes’, “The happy childhood is hardly worth your while”, which I think was sort of his way of saying again, that - how he justified the misery and difficulty of his childhood. Is there a danger in sort of almost, um, fetishising that kind of negativity, and actually you can be a balanced, have a balanced, loving childhood and be perfectly wise and understanding too? It's the other way of looking at it, I suppose.

BRUCE

Yeah, no, well, see and I think that this is, I think you make a very good point. I, I think moderation is an incredibly important and underappreciated element of life, er, and I, I think that you can build resilience and build wisdom of sorts by, er, instead of going out of your way to seek pathology or pathos, you’re - if you do the normal things like I'm gonna, I’m gonna join theatre, I'm gonna do debate, I'm gonna do sport, I'm gonna do other things where there's these moderate, predictable challenges.

And then the reality is, whether you like it or not, somebody you care about is gonna get sick. Something is gonna be out of your control. You may not get into the college you want to. You may get downsized. So you're gonna - there are going to be experiences in a moderate life that can build wisdom.

CRAIG

And I just want to ask you one final question. There's been dozens of pieces of wisdom, I think, in this, er, this podcast that we've been able to pick out from your books, and I really recommend people go and read them and look at them. But if you had to say there's one piece of wisdom that you'd like to give to people, from all your experiences, what would it be?

BRUCE

You know, I, I think the most important thing that I wish people would appreciate is that, um, they need - they should be patient with themselves, and, and that patience and wisdom go hand in hand. You know, these are, um, and that sometimes, you know, they just need to trust that the world comes to them. The quieter you are, the more you see, the easier it is to play with what you see and turn observations into knowledge, and then knowledge becomes wisdom when it's applied.

CRAIG

My thanks to Dr Bruce Perry. Please like and subscribe to Desperately Seeking Wisdom, and tell your friends about it. You can also find transcripts and further reading visit our website, desperatelyseekingwisdom.com. Next week’s guest is the BBC Today programme presenter, Justin Webb. He talks about his extraordinary childhood, with a complex mother who only revealed who his father was when they were watching him present the news. I’m Craig Oliver and this is a Creators Inc Production