What happened to you – Part 3
This is a third blog in series on the new book “What happened to You” by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey. If you would like to read the first two please click on the links:
Oprah has put together her 8 favorite quotes of Dr. Perry from their new collaborative book. I thought I would list them for you in this blog:
- “All of us tend to gravitate to the familiar, even when the familiar is unhealthy or destructive. We are drawn to what we were raised with.”
- “What attention, nurturing touch, reassurance—what love didn’t you get?…Neglect is as toxic as trauma.”
- “Good relationships are the key to healing.”
- “When someone is speaking from the space of anger or fear you can’t reach them with reason.”
- “Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.”
- “When children don’t feel respected by the decisions of their parents, their beliefs about how they are valued are crushed.”
- “We elicit from the world what we project into the world; but what you project is based upon what happened to you as a child.”
- “Each of us creates a unique worldview shaped by our life’s experiences.”
I thought I would let Dr. Perry expand on 2 of his quotes (number 4 and 8).
#4 “The brain’s organized in a hierarchal way. So there’s a bottom, a middle, and a top. And the top part of the brain is where all your thinking sits. But in order to get to that top part of the brain, you have to go through the bottom and middle parts of the brain, which are exquisitely sensitive to the emotional climate. So if there is a sense of anger, frustration, fear, that is being projected by the person you’re interacting with, anything they say or do will be short circuited before it can get to the thinking part of the brain.”
#8 “One of the amazing qualities of the human brain is that it begins to anticipate what is going on in the world around you. And so it really has certain expectations based upon your previous experiences. So if you have a world view that people are unsafe and you go into a classroom, your brain is basically going to be scanning for evidence that that’s true. It’s going to be ignoring the fact that that teacher is kind. It’s going to be ignoring the fact that the teacher tried to engage you and teach you, but it will focus on the fact that the teacher raised their voice when you handed in your homework late.”
If you would like to listen to Dr. Perry’s elaboration on each of these quotes please click on this link.
