Patterns of Consistency
I’m reading Dr. Bruce Perry’s book, “The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog”. In the book, Dr. Perry writes about how the brain craves predictability. “The brain tries to make sense of the world by looking for patterns. When it links coherent, consistently connected patterns together again, it tags them as “normal” or “expected” and stops paying conscious attention.” Traumatized children don’t ever seem to get a break; that predictability is so illusive because their stress response is so active.
Perry, in writing about a child says, “Her attention and impulse problems might be due to a change in the organization of her stress response neural networks, a change that might have once helped her cope with her abuse but was now causing her aggressive behaviors and inattention to her classwork in school. It made sense: a person with an overactive stress system would pay close attention to the faces of people like teachers and classmates, where threat might lurk, but not to benign things like classroom lessons. A heightened awareness of potential threat might also make someone like Tina prone to fighting, as she would be looking everywhere for signs that someone might be about to attack her again, likely causing her to overreact to the smallest potential signs of aggression.”
This is part of the reason V couldn’t survive in public school. There were no patterns of consistency. There were no real efforts to provide an atmosphere of safety to minimize the fear of threats. And when V did overreact, the school administration had no idea how to regulate, calm and reassure her.
V is still struggling in the school setting at the RTC but it is such a relief to have people in charge that know exactly how to respond to her. It’s not only their response that is so great but also their constant efforts to encourage a healthy relationship even though V is constantly trying to sabotage it. They recognize her behaviors for what they are: mostly defense mechanisms. They do a beautiful job of looking beyond her behaviors and if they need to address them, they do so without inducing shame.
“Ultimately, what determines how children survive trauma, physically, emotionally or psychologically, is whether people around them- particularly 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 create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other.”
They must be surrounded by adults that can create consistent patterns.