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Authors: Bruce Perry
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create an effective âmemoryâ and increase strength, experience has to be patterned and repetitive.
And so it is with the neurons, neural systems and the brain. Patterns of experience matter. On a cell-by-cell basis, no other tissue is more suited to change in response to patterned repetitive signals. Indeed, neurons are designed to do just that. It is this molecular gift that allows memory. It produces the synaptic connections that allow us to eat, type, make love,
play basketball and do everything else a human being is capable of doing. It is these intricate webs of interconnection that make the brain work.
By forcing either your muscles or your brain to work, however, you do âstressâ them. Biological systems exist in balance. In order to function they have to stay within a certain limited range appropriate to their current activity, and it is the brain that is charged with maintaining this essential equilibrium. The actual experience is a stressor; the impact on the system is stress. And so, if you get dehydrated during exercise, for example, that stress will make you thirsty because your brain is trying to drive you to replace the needed fluids. Similarly, when a child learns a new vocabulary word, there is a tiny stress applied to the cortex, which requires repetitive stimulation to create accurate recall. Without the stress, the system wouldnât know there is something new to attend to. In other words, stress is not always bad.
Indeed, if moderate, predictable and patterned, it is stress that makes a system stronger and more functionally capable. Hence, the stronger muscle in the present is the one that has endured moderate stress in the past. And the same is true for the brainâs stress response systems. Through moderate, predictable challenges our stress response systems are activated moderately. This makes for a resilient, flexible stress response capacity. The stronger stress response system in the present is the one that has had moderate, patterned stress in the past.
However, that is not the whole story. If you try to bench press 200 pounds on your first trip to the gym, if you do manage to lift the weight at all, youâre not likely to build muscle, but tear it and hurt yourself. The pattern and intensity of experience matter. If a system is overloadedâworked beyond capacityâthe result can be profound deterioration, disorganization and dysfunction whether you are overworking your back muscles at the gym or your brainâs stress networks when confronted with traumatic stress.
This also means that as a result of the strengthening effect of previous moderate and patterned experience, what may be traumatically stressful for one person may be trivial for another. Just as a body builder can
carry weights that untrained people cannot even move, so too can some brains deal with traumatic events that would cripple others. The context, timing and response of others matters profoundly. The death of a parent is far more traumatic for the two-year-old child of a single mother than it is for a fifty-year-old married man with children of his own.
In Tinaâs case and that of the boys at the center, their experience of stress was far beyond their young systemsâ capacities to carry it. Rather than moderate, predictable and strengthening activation of their stress systems, they had suffered unpredictable, prolonged and extreme experiences that had marked their young lives profoundly. I couldnât see any way that this would not be true for Sandy as well.
Â
BEFORE I MET HER I tried to get as much background and history on Sandy as I could. I talked with her current foster family, her new caseworker and, ultimately, with members of her extended family. I learned that she had profound sleep problems and was pervasively anxious. I was told that she had an increased startle response. Just like the traumatized Vietnam vets Iâd worked with, she would jump at the
And so it is with the neurons, neural systems and the brain. Patterns of experience matter. On a cell-by-cell basis, no other tissue is more suited to change in response to patterned repetitive signals. Indeed, neurons are designed to do just that. It is this molecular gift that allows memory. It produces the synaptic connections that allow us to eat, type, make love,
play basketball and do everything else a human being is capable of doing. It is these intricate webs of interconnection that make the brain work.
By forcing either your muscles or your brain to work, however, you do âstressâ them. Biological systems exist in balance. In order to function they have to stay within a certain limited range appropriate to their current activity, and it is the brain that is charged with maintaining this essential equilibrium. The actual experience is a stressor; the impact on the system is stress. And so, if you get dehydrated during exercise, for example, that stress will make you thirsty because your brain is trying to drive you to replace the needed fluids. Similarly, when a child learns a new vocabulary word, there is a tiny stress applied to the cortex, which requires repetitive stimulation to create accurate recall. Without the stress, the system wouldnât know there is something new to attend to. In other words, stress is not always bad.
Indeed, if moderate, predictable and patterned, it is stress that makes a system stronger and more functionally capable. Hence, the stronger muscle in the present is the one that has endured moderate stress in the past. And the same is true for the brainâs stress response systems. Through moderate, predictable challenges our stress response systems are activated moderately. This makes for a resilient, flexible stress response capacity. The stronger stress response system in the present is the one that has had moderate, patterned stress in the past.
However, that is not the whole story. If you try to bench press 200 pounds on your first trip to the gym, if you do manage to lift the weight at all, youâre not likely to build muscle, but tear it and hurt yourself. The pattern and intensity of experience matter. If a system is overloadedâworked beyond capacityâthe result can be profound deterioration, disorganization and dysfunction whether you are overworking your back muscles at the gym or your brainâs stress networks when confronted with traumatic stress.
This also means that as a result of the strengthening effect of previous moderate and patterned experience, what may be traumatically stressful for one person may be trivial for another. Just as a body builder can
carry weights that untrained people cannot even move, so too can some brains deal with traumatic events that would cripple others. The context, timing and response of others matters profoundly. The death of a parent is far more traumatic for the two-year-old child of a single mother than it is for a fifty-year-old married man with children of his own.
In Tinaâs case and that of the boys at the center, their experience of stress was far beyond their young systemsâ capacities to carry it. Rather than moderate, predictable and strengthening activation of their stress systems, they had suffered unpredictable, prolonged and extreme experiences that had marked their young lives profoundly. I couldnât see any way that this would not be true for Sandy as well.
Â
BEFORE I MET HER I tried to get as much background and history on Sandy as I could. I talked with her current foster family, her new caseworker and, ultimately, with members of her extended family. I learned that she had profound sleep problems and was pervasively anxious. I was told that she had an increased startle response. Just like the traumatized Vietnam vets Iâd worked with, she would jump at the
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