Prior to my visit to North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC) last year, James Deakin asked if I would give talks about trauma and healing, emphasising that numbers of people arriving at NWRC have previously been traumatised. I was later told that my talks, which focused on the work of leading trauma expert Bruce Perry and his book What Happened To You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, written with Oprah Winfrey, were a great success and highly appreciated.
They helped people understand what impact their previous adversities had on their brain, and not only gave them insights into the healing process, but also showed how experiencing these adversities could lead to them developing post-traumatic wisdom. In this summary, I touch on some of the important information that I presented in those talks.
Bruce Perry emphasises that traumatic experiences, and unpredictable, extreme and prolonged stressors, lead to our core stress regulatory systems, which arise in the brainstem and regulate all other parts of the brain and body, becoming overactive and overly reactive. This dysfunction increases the likelihood of emotional and social, as well as mental and physical health, problems arising. Experiencing prolonged marginalisation or shaming is also traumatising and leads to dysfunction of our stress regulatory systems.
Research has revealed that ‘your history of relational health—your connectedness to family, community, and culture—is more predictable of your mental health than your history of adversity.… Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.’ That’s the good news.
The bad news is that ‘Our society’s transgenerational social fabric is fraying. We’re disconnecting.’ This disconnection, or relational poverty, means that we have a lessened ability to buffer the negative impact of stressors. We become more vulnerable to adversity, which is leading to the increases in anxiety, depression and suicide that are occurring in society today. More people turn to illegal and legal (alcohol and prescription) drugs to alleviate their psychological pain, which leads to more people developing serious substance use problems.
A major consequence of our stress response systems becoming overactive is that there is a shutdown in higher areas of the brain, such as the cortex. This means that it may not be possible to communicate rationally and successfully with someone that you are trying to help deal with the impact of their trauma.
Bruce emphasises that we must first make sure that they are regulated, then make sure they feel they are in a relationship with you, and only then try to reason with them. Activities that help overly reactive stress regulatory response networks get back in balance involve patterned, repetitive, rhythmic activities. Music, sport, dance, drawing or walking in nature regulate. They also have important relational elements.
Bruce also points out that if we want to provide therapeutic, healing interactions, they must be moderate, controllable and predictable interactions. ‘Healing takes place when there are dozens of therapeutic moments available each day for the person to control, revisiting and reworking their traumatic experience.’
I can only touch upon a few gems from this amazing book. The book will help you understand how recovery communities like NWRC can facilitate a healing process and, in doing so, create real magic. There is much that NWRC can teach others in their wider community, and help reduce disconnection and its impact.
