The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (34 page)

Peter was smiling. Then, it was time. I didn't know how much I would say, or even what I would say. I would let the response of the children—and Peter—guide me. I jumped in, “Well. Thank you for letting me come to your classroom. Peter told me about you guys when he came to visit me in Houston. I know he went to kindergarten with many of you.” A few of the children raised their hands. “We asked Peter to come to our clinic in Houston because we wanted to learn from him about his amazing brain.”

The children looked at Peter. “See, when he was a little boy he spent every minute of every day for the first three years of his life in one crib.” The children looked interested, but kind of confused. “Peter was born in another country where they did not know very much about the brain. His parents could not take care of him so Peter went to an orphanage when he was just a baby. In this orphanage each baby was put in a crib and that was their home. They didn't get to wander around, crawl anywhere, or even practice standing so they could learn to walk. Until his parents came to get him when he was three, Peter never had a chance to walk around, to play with friends, to get a hug from any loving grown-ups. His brain didn't get very much stimulation.” The room was completely silent: twenty-six six-year-old children didn't move, speak or fidget.

“And then when he was three, his new parents came and brought him to live in Tulsa.” I paused to let some of the tension dissipate. “And that is when Peter's amazing brain started to learn so many things. Even though
he had never heard English, he learned English in just a couple years. He had never had a chance to walk or run or skip and he learned to do all of those things.” Peter looked embarrassed. I didn't want to push too much. “And so even today, Peter's amazing brain is learning. He has really done great. And that is why we wanted to meet Peter and learn more about how any person with such a hard start in life could do so well.”

Then I ended with, “Part of what we learned is that every day in school, Peter learns things from all of you. He watches how you do things, he learns from playing with each of you and he learns from just being your friend. So thank you for helping Peter. And thanks for letting me come and talk about the brain.”

It was a short and simple talk. I tried to take an unknown—Peter—and make him less frightening to these children. And over time, their natural goodness emerged. No longer an odd and scary boy, Peter became popular—so popular, in fact, that his peers would argue over who got to sit next to him, who got to be his partner, who got to be in his group. The brightest and strongest children in his class took a special interest in him and their leadership made all the difference. They included him, protected him and, ultimately, provided therapeutic experiences that helped Peter catch up.

They were tolerant of his developmental problems, patient in correcting his social mistakes and nurturing in their interactions. These children provided many more positive therapeutic experiences than we ever could have given Peter.

Children, just like us adults, react badly to the unknown, to the strange and unfamiliar, especially when they themselves are trying to adjust to a new situation like the start of a school year. Although their social hierarchies aren't always so easy to influence, most bullying and social rejection begins with fear of the unfamiliar, and adults have much more influence over the process than they may believe. When children understand why someone behaves oddly, they give him or her more slack, generally. And the younger the children are, the more easily they are influenced by both obvious and subtle cues of rejection and acceptance from adults. These
cues often set the tone for the children's status systems, and teachers and parents can either minimize bullying or unfortunately, maximize it, by either strongly discouraging or tolerating the scapegoating of those who are “different.”

Knowing that Peter's immature behavior came from his history of deprivation helped his classmates reinterpret it. When he grabbed something or talked out of turn, they no longer saw it as a personal affront or jarring oddity, but simply as a remnant from his past that they'd been taught to expect. The results were rapid: almost immediately he stopped having tantrums and outbursts, probably because what had prompted them was frustration, a sense of rejection and feeling misunderstood. Because the other children were more forgiving and more explicit about the social cues they were giving him, he was able to read them better and thus able to fit in better. What had been a downward spiral of rejection, confusion and frustration became instead a cascade of positive reinforcement, which fed on itself. The huge gaps in developmental age across emotional, social, motor and cognitive domains slowly filled in. By the time Peter reached high school he no longer stood out and he has continued to do well, both academically and socially.

His peers and his family healed him by creating a rich social world, a nurturing community. While the neurosequential approach helped us provide the specific stimuli his brain had lacked, massage offering the physical affection that he'd missed, and music and movement to help restore his brain and bodily rhythms, none of that would have been enough without Amy and Jason's love and sensitivity and without the patience and support of his classmates. The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.

chapter 11

Healing Communities

IT HAS BEEN an extraordinary privilege to work with the children whose stories I have shared here—and I have learned a tremendous amount from them. I have been consistently amazed by their courage, their strength and their ability to cope with situations that most adults would find unbearable. But while emerging therapeutic models like the neurosequential approach hold great promise, my experience as well as the research suggests that the most important healing experiences in the lives of traumatized children do not occur in therapy itself.

Trauma and our responses to it cannot be understood outside the context of human relationships. Whether people have survived an earthquake or have been repeatedly sexually abused, what matters most is how those experiences affect their relationships—to their loved ones, to themselves and to the world. The most traumatic aspects of all disasters involve the shattering of human connections. And this is especially true for children. Being harmed by the people who are supposed to love you, being abandoned by them, being robbed of the one-on-one relationships that allow you to feel safe and valued and to become humane—these are profoundly destructive experiences. Because humans are inescapably social beings, the worst catastrophes that can befall us inevitably involve relational loss.

As a result, recovery from trauma and neglect is also all about relationships—rebuilding trust, regaining confidence, returning to a sense
of security and reconnecting to love. Of course, medications can help relieve symptoms and talking to a therapist can be incredibly useful. But healing and recovery are impossible—even with the best medications and therapy in the world—without lasting, caring connections to others. Indeed, at heart it is the relationship with the therapist, not primarily his or her methods or words of wisdom, that allows therapy to work. All the children who ultimately thrived following our treatment did so because of a strong social network that surrounded and supported them.

What healed children like Peter, Justin, Amber and Laura were the people around them, their families, their friends, the folks who respected them, who were tolerant of their weaknesses and vulnerabilities and who were patient in helping them slowly build new skills. Whether it was the coach who allowed Ted to keep team statistics, Mama P. who helped teach Virginia how to nurture Laura, the first graders who took Peter under their wing and protected him, or the incredible adoptive parents of so many of my patients—all of them provided the most important therapy that these children ever received. Because what they needed most was a rich social environment, one where they could belong and be loved.

What maltreated and traumatized children most need is a healthy community to buffer the pain, distress and loss caused by their earlier trauma. What works to heal them is anything that increases the number and quality of a child's relationships. What helps is consistent, patient, repetitive loving care. And, I should add, what doesn't work is well-intended but poorly trained mental health “professionals” rushing in after a traumatic event, or coercing children to “open up” or “get out their anger.”

However, because it is exactly those children who are most vulnerable to trauma who are least likely to have a healthy, supportive family and community, it is exceedingly difficult to provide effective help through the current systems we have in place. Because healthy communities themselves are often what prevents interpersonal traumatic events (like domestic violence and other violent crime) from occurring in the first
place, the breakdown of social connection that is common in our highly mobile society increases everyone's vulnerability.

If we are to successfully raise healthy children, children who will be resilient in the face of any traumatic experience they may encounter—and some 40 percent of children will experience at least one potentially traumatic event before they become adults—we need to build a healthier society. The wonderful thing about our species is that we can learn; our memories and our technologies allow us to benefit from the experience of those who came before us. But at the same time those technologies, even the ones that are presumably meant to bring us together, are increasingly keeping us apart. The modern world has disrupted and in many cases abandoned the fundamental biological unit of human social life: the extended family. There has been so much emphasis on the breakdown of the nuclear family, but I believe that in many cases the extended family, whose dissolution has been much less discussed, is at least as important. It certainly, as you may recall from Leon's story, can make the difference between a young couple who are able to cope and raise a healthy child and one where one or both parents becomes overwhelmed and neglectful.

For countless generations humans lived in small groups, made up of 40 to 150 people, most of whom were closely related to each other and lived communally. As late as the year 1500, the average family group in Europe consisted of roughly twenty people whose lives were intimately connected on a daily basis. But by 1850 that number was down to ten living in close proximity, and in 1960 the number was just five. In the year 2000 the average size of a household was less than four, and a shocking 26 percent of Americans live alone.

As technology has advanced, we have gotten farther and farther away from the environment for which evolution shaped us. The world we live in now is biologically disrespectful; it does not take into account many of our most basic human needs and often pulls us away from healthy activities and toward those that are harmful. My field, unfortunately, has been part of this trend.

For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that “unless you love yourself, no one else will love you.” Women were told that they didn't need men, and vice versa. People without any relationships were believed to be as healthy as those who had many. These ideas contradict the fundamental biology of human species: we are social mammals and could never have survived without deeply interconnected and interdependent human contact. The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.

I believe we're at a transitional point in history where people are recognizing that modern societies have abandoned many of the fundamental elements required for optimal human mental health. We can see the problem in the seemingly inexorable rise in depression rates around the world, which cannot be explained solely by better treatment and diagnosis. A person born in 1905 had only a 1 percent chance of suffering depression by age seventy-five, but by their twenty-fourth birthday, 6 percent of those born in 1955 had had an episode of serious depression. Other studies indicate that teen depression rates have increased by an incredible factor of ten in recent decades. We can also recognize this trend in changing patterns of marriage and divorce, in the difficulties people report in finding satisfying romantic relationships, in the constant struggle families across the economic spectrum have in attempting to find a balance between work and home life. The disconnect between what we need in order to be mentally healthy and what the modern world offers can also be seen in the constant unease felt by parents—about the Inter-net, the media, drugs, violent predators, pedophiles, economic inequality and above all, the values of our culture that shape our responses to these issues. From right to left, no one seems to believe that our current way of life is healthy, even as we disagree about exactly what's wrong and what should be done about it.

It's time for our leaders to step up and ask: “How do we build community in a modern world? How do you explore relationships in a
world that is going to have television, that will include email, artificially extended days because of electric lights, and automobiles, airplanes, psychoactive drugs, plastic surgery and everything else that goes along with advancing technologies? How do we deal with the presence of all of those things and create a world that respects our biological needs, one that enhances our connections to others rather than ignores or disrupts them?”

I certainly don't have all the answers, but I do know that many of our current childcare practices are hurting our children. For example, in California, at a large center serving three- to five-year-olds, staff members are not allowed to touch the children. If they want to be hugged or held, the adults are supposed to push them away! This is a classic example of how a seemingly good idea—wanting to protect children from sexual predators—can have serious negative consequences. Children need healthy touch. As we've seen, infants can literally die without it. It's part of our biology.