The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• Numerous animal studies showed that even seemingly minor stress during infancy could have a permanent impact on the architecture and the chemistry of the brain and, therefore, on behavior. I thought: why wouldn’t the same be true for humans?
• By conservative estimates, about 40 percent of American children will have at least one potentially traumatizing experience by age eighteen: this includes the death of a parent or sibling, ongoing physical abuse and/or neglect, sexual abuse, or the experience of a serious accident, natural disaster, or domestic violence or other violent crime.
• Ultimately, what determines how children survive trauma, physically, emotionally, or psychologically, is whether the people around them—particularly the adults they should be able to trust and rely upon—stand by them with love, support, and encouragement. Fire can warm or consume, water can quench or drown, wind can caress or cut. And so it is with human relationships: we can both create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other.
• My work has revealed to me a great deal about moral development, about the roots of evil and how genetic tendencies and environmental influences can shape critical decisions, which in turn affect later choices and, ultimately, who we turn out to be.
• Memory is the capacity to carry forward in time some element of an experience.
• Unfortunately, the prevailing view of children and trauma at the time—one that persists to a large degree to this day—is that “children are resilient.”
• If anything, children are more vulnerable to trauma than adults; I knew this from Seymour Levine’s work and the work of dozens of others by then. Resilient children are made, not born. The developing brain is most malleable and most sensitive to experience—both good and bad—early in life. (This is why we so easily and rapidly learn language, social nuance, motor skills, and dozens of other things in childhood, and why we speak of “formative” experiences.) Children become resilient as a result of the patterns of stress and of nurturing that they experience early on in life, as we shall see in greater detail later in this book. Consequently, we are also rapidly and easily transformed by trauma when we are young. Though its effects may not always be visible to the untrained eye, when you know what trauma can do to children, sadly, you begin to see its aftermath everywhere.
• To create an effective “memory” and increase strength, experience has to be patterned and repetitive.
• The pattern and intensity of experience matter. If a system is overloaded—worked beyond capacity—the result can be profound deterioration, disorganization, and dysfunction whether you are overworking your back muscles at the gym or your brain’s stress networks when confronted with traumatic stress.
• Patterned, repetitive stimuli lead to tolerance, while chaotic, infrequent signals produce sensitization.
• As one family therapist famously put it, we tend to prefer the “certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.”
• The same miraculous plasticity that allows young brains to quickly learn love and language, unfortunately, also makes them highly susceptible to negative experiences as well.
• In order for an animal to be biologically successful, its brain must guide it to meet three prime directives: first, it must stay alive, second, it must procreate, and third, if it bears dependent young as humans do, it must protect and nurture these offspring until they are able to fend for themselves. Even in humans, all of the thousands of complex capacities of the brain are connected, in one way or another, to systems originally evolved to drive these three functions.
• But throughout history, while some humans have been our best friends and kept us safe, others have been our worst enemies. The major predators of human beings are other human beings. Our stress response systems, therefore, are closely interconnected with the systems that read and respond to human social cues. As a result we are very sensitive to expressions, gestures, and the moods of others.
• Unfortunately, however, the tactical team in charge of operations continued to see Koresh as a con man, not a religious leader. Just as the group dynamics within the cult pushed them toward their horrific conclusion, so too did the group dynamics within law enforcement. Both groups tragically disregarded input that did not fit their world view, their templates. The law enforcement echo chamber magnified rumors about Koresh beyond belief; at one point, there was actually concern that he’d developed a nuclear weapon and was planning to deploy it at the compound. Both groups listened primarily to people who simply confirmed what they already believed.
• In fact, the research on the most effective treatments to help child trauma victims might be accurately summed up this way: what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child’s life.
• The brain is an historical organ. It stores our personal narrative. Our life experiences shape who we become by creating our brain’s catalog of template memories, which guide our behavior, sometimes in ways we can consciously recognize, more often via processes beyond our awareness. A crucial element in figuring out any brain-related clinical problem, therefore, is getting an accurate history of the patient’s experiences. Since much of the brain develops early in life, the way we are parented has a dramatic influence on brain development. And so, since we tend to care for our children the way we were cared for ourselves during our own childhoods, a good “brain” history of a child begins with a history of the caregiver’s childhood and early experience.
• For example, if one of a kitten’s eyes is kept closed during the first few weeks of its life, it will be blind in that eye, even though the eye is completely normal. The visual circuitry of the brain requires normal experience of sight in order to wire itself; lacking visual stimuli, the neurons in the closed eye fail to make crucial connections and the opportunity for sight and depth perception is lost. Similarly, if a child is not exposed to language during his early life, he may never be able to speak or understand speech normally. If a child doesn’t become fluent in a second language before puberty, he will almost always speak any new language he does learn with an accent.
• Not enough repetition occurs to clinch the connection; people are not interchangeable. The price of love is the agony of loss, from infancy onward. The attachment between a baby and his first primary caregivers is not trivial: the love a baby feels for his caregivers is every bit as profound as the deepest romantic connection. Indeed, it is the template memory of this primary attachment that will allow the baby to have healthy intimate relationships as an adult.
• In order to function socially, people need to develop what is known as a “theory of mind.” They need to know, in other words, that other people are distinct from them, have different knowledge about the world and have different desires and interests. In autism this distinction is blurred.
• The human brain, the ultimate complex system—in fact, the most complicated object in the known universe—is equally vulnerable to a version of the butterfly effect. This might also be called a “snowball effect”: when things go right early on, they will tend to continue to go right and even to self-correct if there are minor problems. But when they go wrong at first, they will tend to continue to go wrong.
• The brain is built—our selves are built—from millions of tiny decisions—some conscious, most not. Seemingly irrelevant choices can result in tremendously different later outcomes. Timing is everything. We don’t know when the smallest choice, or “stimuli,” will push a developing brain onto the path of genius, or onto the highway to hell. I want to stress that this doesn’t mean that parents have to be perfect. But it’s important to know that young children are extraordinarily susceptible to the spiraling consequences of the choices we—and later they—make, for good and for ill.
• It’s common in our mobile modern society to have fewer offspring, live further away from our families, and move in an increasingly age-segregated world, and therefore many of us aren’t around children enough to learn about how they should behave at each stage of development. Furthermore, our public education includes no content or training on child development, caregiving, or the basics of brain development. The result is a kind of “child illiteracy,”
• “He never cried,” she said, emphatically, not aware that if a baby never cries, this is as much a sign of potential problems as crying too much can be.
• Part of the reason for Justin’s rapid response to our therapy, I soon recognized, was that he had had nurturing experiences during his first year of life, before his grandmother had died. This meant his lowest and most central brain regions had been given a good start. If he’d been raised in a cage from birth, his future might have been far less hopeful.
• A number of genetically influenced factors matter. Temperament, which is affected by genetics and intrauterine environment (influenced by maternal heart rate, nutrition, hormone levels, and drugs) is one. As noted previously, children whose stress response systems are naturally better regulated from birth are easier babies, so their parents are less likely to get frustrated with them and abuse or neglect them. Intelligence is another critical factor, one that is often poorly understood. Intelligence is basically faster information processing: a person requires fewer repetitions of an experience to make an association. This property of intelligence appears to be largely genetically determined. Being able to learn with fewer repetitions means that brighter children can, in essence, do more with less.
• In the last fifteen years numerous nonprofit organizations and government agencies have focused on the importance of education about appropriate parenting and early childhood development, and on just how much critical brain development goes on in the first few years of life. From Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” to Rob Reiner’s “I Am Your Child” Foundation to the Zero to Three organization and the United Way’s “Success by Six,” millions of dollars have been spent to educate the public about the needs of young children.
• Believing that you cannot recover unless you remember the precise details of a past trauma can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It can keep you focused on the past rather than dealing with the present. For example, some studies have found that depression can be exacerbated by ruminating on past negative events. Because of how memory works, such rumination can also lead you to recall old, ambiguous memories in a new light, one that, over time, becomes darker and darker until it eventually becomes a trauma that never actually occurred.
• 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.
• 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.
• The truth is you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.
• 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 Internet, 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.
• When humans evolved they didn’t live in a world where one woman spent her day alone with her offspring while her partner spent his day at the office. Both men and women worked hard to ensure survival, but women worked together with young children close at hand and older boys often accompanied men and were trained by them. An overwhelmed mother could hand her infant off to an aunt or a sister or a grandmother: there were, on average, four adolescents and adults for every young child. Today we think that a daycare center has an excellent adult/child ratio when there is one caregiver for every five children!
• Hrdy’s book, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, stresses the importance of extended family, whom she calls “alloparents.” She notes, “For children at risk of neglect, it is amazing how much difference alloparental interventions, say, from a grandparent, can make.” We have seen that throughout this book.
• In addition, our educational system and our society’s general disrespect for the importance of relationships is undermining the development of empathy. Like language, empathy is a fundamental capacity of the human species, one that helps define what a human being is. But like language, empathy, too, must be learned.
• In today’s safety culture we seem to swing from strictly monitoring and guiding our children from infancy through high school, and then releasing them to the absolute freedom of college (though some parents are trying to encroach there as well). We have to remember that for most of human history adolescents took on adult roles earlier and rose admirably to the challenge. Many of the problems we have with teenagers result from failing to adequately challenge their growing brains. While we now know that the brain’s decision-making areas aren’t completely wired until at least their early twenties, it is experience making decisions that wires them, and it can’t be done without taking some risks. We need to allow children to try and fail. And when they do make the stupid, shortsighted decisions that come from inexperience, we need to let them suffer the results. At the same time we also need to provide balance by not setting policies that will magnify one mistake, like drug use or fighting, into a life-derailing catastrophe. Unfortunately, this is exactly what our current “zero tolerance” policies—that expel children from school for just one rule violation—do.
• Evolutionists had long emphasized “nature, red in tooth and claw,” but a view that focused on the competition of the fittest for survival missed one of the most fascinating and important characteristics of humans and quite a few other species: the propensity for altruism.
• In order for a child to become kind, giving and empathetic, he needs to be treated that way. Punishment can’t create or model those qualities. Although we do need to set limits, if we want our children to behave well, we have to treat them well. A child raised with love wants to make those around him happy because he sees that his happiness makes them happy, too; he doesn’t simply comply to avoid punishment. These positive feedback loops are every bit as powerful as the negative ones, but they rely upon the sometimes counterintuitive response of first figuring out what drives misbehavior, then dealing with it, rather than acting first.
• One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in my work is the importance of simply taking the time, before doing anything else, to pay attention and listen. Because of the mirroring neurobiology of our brains, one of the best ways to help someone else become calm and centered is to calm and center ourselves first—and then just pay attention.
• “A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.” —“AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM” (1711) ALEXANDER POPE
• Indeed, I have often speculated that many of the studies of ADHD and conduct disorder are complicated by the fact that more than 30 percent of study participants are actually manifesting trauma-related symptoms, not just some sort of genetically-based problem with the development of the brain’s attentional and executive control systems. Recent studies support this hypothesis.
• To begin, we intentionally stopped giving “labels” to individuals and started creating “pictures” of their developmental journey and their current brain organization and functioning. This immediately had a quite positive “side effect”: it helped reduce stigma for our clients and made them feel less broken and alien. Further, the description of their journey to the present and the visual image of their current functioning helped them become more engaged participants in their own treatment planning process.