What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

This chapter discusses relational poverty in the modern world and its impact on the human experience.

Perry recounts his time with the Māori community, and his attempt to learn about trauma and healing through the lens of the community. He describes how the community has no conceptual separation of problems into categories. There is a wholeness to their thinking and being. All problems are interconnected, and they see the Western approach as chasing symptoms rather than healing people. Pain, distress, and dysfunction all arise from fragmentation, disconnection, and desynchrony. A core element to the Māori approach to healing is the concept of whanaungatanga, which refers to reciprocal relationships, kinship, and family connection, and the importance of these in the process of healing.

Upon returning from his time with Māori, Perry applied this approach to a patient, a 10-year-old boy named Timothy. Timothy had been diagnosed with ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and medications had not been helping his symptoms. His history showed that he had been physically abused from the ages of three to six by his mother’s live-in partner. After his mother finally left the man, Timothy and his mother found themselves impoverished. They moved cities a lot in those years, finally settling in Texas. His mother managed to find steady work, but the years had taken their toll, and she was barely functioning. Timothy himself displayed deep social immaturity owing to the few opportunities for interactions and practice he had received in these years. Neither parent nor child had a web of therapeutic relationships to help them weather these circumstances.

Based on his learnings from the Māori community, Perry changed his treatment approach. He enrolled the mother in a clinic and found an in-school mentor, as well as an after-school program, for Timothy. He also stopped all medications. Perry encouraged the mother to join a church group for single parents. The team also met with teachers at Timothy’s school and informed them about the boy’s history; following this, they began to take a special interest in Timothy. Six months later, Timothy was thriving. He had a new best friend, was active in school and after, and his progress proved a tonic for his mother who had also found new friendships and was doing much better in her own personal life.

Timothy’s case is a classic instance of relational poverty that exists in the modern world. The lower number of interactions leads to a decreased ability to tolerate stressors; the lack of connectedness contributes to this lowered threshold. The ability to interact with people different from oneself is diminishing, as such people are seen as threats. This kind of over-reactivity and sensitivity are seen in cultural phenomena such as the emergence of “cancel culture.” Perry stresses the importance of both rupture and repair in building resilience within relationships. Occasional ruptures provide doses of moderate and controllable stress as long as conversations follow to ensure repair. He advises against leaving an argument in a rage, but instead allow occasional ruptures and the repairs that follow, which provide opportunities for people to reconnect and grow within relationships.

Perry suggests that the human brain is not designed for the modern world (256). Pre-modernity, humans existed in small social networks of 60 to 100 people within a group. Kinship and relationships extended within this group, and an individual’s world was embedded within the clan and the natural world. Although small, the world still provided larger developmental diversity than at present through the presence of multiple, closely co-existing generations and families.

In contrast, the modern world’s rate of invention exceeds the rate of the human ability to problem-solve. Our stress-response systems are constantly drained by having to monitor the cacophony of the modern world: constant sounds and stimulation from machines and devices. One constantly has to monitor something new in urban environments and scan and access sensory input as either safe, familiar, or potentially dangerous. Perry suggests that humans exist in rebellion against nature in the modern world by way of things like artificial lights, which affect the circadian rhythm, and consumption of processed foods that stress the digestive system. For some, worry about things like housing, food, and employment, among others, prove additional stressors over and above the fact of modern existence.

Poverty is not merely material, but also relational: isolation and loneliness are facts of modern existence. Perry reiterates that the best predictor of mental health is one’s connectedness, or, one’s basic capabilities to form and maintain relationships. However, modern life inherently affords fewer opportunities for relational interactions; furthermore, with the advent of hand-held digital devices, people have become further isolated from each other within a single household, each person absorbed in their individual screens. The introduction of screens to young children is touted as particularly problematic. As with any other brain-mediated function, the development of empathy, too, is use-dependent. When a screen is introduced to a young child, the colorful and attractive content becomes more pleasurable to the otherwise naturally curious infant; they are content to passively consume content from a screen, rather than explore their natural world through sense and touch. At the earliest stages of life, the relational parts of the brain are rapidly organizing and developing. The less a young child takes in real and tangible sensory input from the people and world around them, the more underdeveloped their neural networks will be, negatively impacting their capacity for connectedness and empathy as they grow. The only way to develop these capacities in children is by consistently providing opportunities for stimulation by way of real conversations and interactions with people around them.