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

This chapter focuses on the idea of seeking balance, explaining the concept of regulation and how it relates to stress, reward, rhythm, and relationships.

Winfrey reflects on how the heart helps regulate the body’s emotional energy; a rapid heartbeat can indicate stress and panic, while a steady pace is associated with calm and balance. The heart is constantly tuned to one’s surroundings, sending messages about how safe or alert one ought to feel in one’s surroundings. When Winfrey feels overwhelmed, stressed, or irritable, the easiest way for her to regulate herself is to walk in nature, focusing on her breath and her heartbeat. Similarly, she suggests that different activities like music, dancing, and even cooking, which have their own rhythm, can be equally regulating for different people.

Perry agrees, stressing that rhythm of some kind is essential to a healthy life. He explains the term regulation, which points to the different systems of the body being in balance. Stress is nothing but any trigger or incident that disturbs the balance of the mind or body, and this leads to dysregulation. Adults can regulate themselves in multiple ways: when hungry, an adult will fix themselves a snack; when upset, they will find an activity that soothes them, such as listening to music or talking to a friend. Infants are not yet able to do this for themselves, and so when dysregulated, they cry. The responsive, caring adults in the infant’s life will help regulate the infant by feeding, rocking, changing, or shushing them. Thus, over time, with consistent input from the adults around them and through co-regulation, an individual gradually learns to self-regulate as they grow up. Furthermore, the associations between rhythm and regulation are formed.

Perry references the “Tree of Regulation,” or “networks in your brain [that] allow you to regulate yourself and connect to people in healthy relationships” (50). These neural systems, or core regulatory networks (CRNs), originate in the lower part of the brain and spread throughout its structure (53); they work together to help maintain an individual’s regulation in the face of different stressors. These CRNs are of three kinds: the first are stress response systems, the second are networks related to the formation of relationships, and the third governs the reward system. Over time, and with the presence of a consistent, nurturing caregiver, these three wire together in an individual’s brain to form strong, healthy roots for the “Tree of Regulation.” Regulation, relationship, and reward are inextricably linked, and the individual forms the healthy internal view that people are generally safe, predictable, and caring. Generally, projecting this internal view or expectation of people will also, in turn, elicit similar behavior from others.

Perry offers the example of a scene he witnessed at an airport. While waiting to board a flight that was continually delayed due to bad weather, one old man in particular was getting increasingly irritated with each delay announcement. At one point he visibly snapped, yelling at the flight staff that he needed to reach his destination to attend an important business meeting. A young toddler who was watching the scene was intrigued by why the surrounding crowd had fallen silent while this man talked. She toddled up to the grumpy old man, and with her expectation of people generally being good, pulled down the man’s newspaper playfully. Her “goodness projected” finally elicited a similar response from the man; he smiled back at her and proceeded to play with her for the next 30 minutes, until the flight was finally ready to board.

The ideal of a consistent, nurturing, and responsive caregiver is difficult to attain in the modern world, which sees many parents caring for their children with inadequate support. The caregivers themselves are overwhelmed and dysregulated, which inherently prohibits them from being consistent and predictable with their children. This leads to two things: firstly, it affects the development of the child’s stress response systems (55), leading to a sensitization of these systems. This means that the systems adapt to constantly anticipate stress, even in situations that do not pose a challenge. A boy living with the constant threat of domestic violence will become hypervigilant, constantly scanning any environment for a sign of threat. While it is necessary at home, the same behavior is maladaptive in a classroom, and may even earn him a label of having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). The second problem caused by inconsistent and unpredictable caregiving with young children is the child’s ability to create connections and form relationships. If the caregiver is “episodically rough, frustrated, cold, or absent” (56), the child is unable to form the stable, internal worldview that people are basically safe, predictable, and caring.

Perry emphasizes that perhaps more important than anything else with respect to the caregiver and infant is the pattern of stress activation. With the presence of predictable, moderate, and controlled stress, the individual develops resilience. However, if the stress-response systems are activated in prolonged or chaotic ways, as would be the case with an inconsistent caregiver, then the systems become sensitized or dysfunctional (57). With respect to stress, there is general awareness about the “fight or flight” response that activates when an individual is faced with a threat; however, Perry explains a third possibility that can be seen in very young children, when one is too small to effectively fight or flee. In such cases, dissociation becomes a common adaptive strategy: “fighting or fleeing won’t protect you, but ‘disappearing’ might” (59). The young child learns to escape into their inner world where they feel safe, free, and in control.

Perry connects this dissociative response to stress with the adult behavior of addiction, suggesting that any form of addiction is a way of seeking relief from the feeling of dysregulation. Whether it be food, alcohol, exercise, or drugs, addiction is a form of escape of the same manner that a dissociative response indicates. This escape provides pleasure in releasing someone with addiction from distress, which becomes a powerful reward, and sees the individual habitually returning to their addiction. Perry observes that for individuals who are fairly well-regulated from the outset, consuming a drug does not have the same intense pull that it will on a dysregulated individual; even if a pleasurable feeling, the need to use again and again is not as powerful. This is because their “reward bucket” is already full through numerous other, healthy associations—work, hobbies, relationships, and so on. The addictive substance does not fulfill a need, as it does for a dysregulated person, whose “reward bucket” is empty.

Perry further suggests that the most powerful form of reward is, in fact, relational, thus offering the most regulation: “Without connection to people who care for you, spend time with you, and support you, it is almost impossible to step away from any form of unhealthy reward and regulation” (66). This calls back to the image of the “Tree of Regulation” he presented earlier, where the ideas of regulation, relationship, and reward are inextricably linked to form a stable and healthy internal worldview. A healthy “Tree of Regulation,” thus, becomes one of the most significant factors in an individual’s life that can assure them balance.