Vital Agents for Change

International Trauma expert Bruce Perry explained to an Adoption UK audience last week that adoptive parents are vital agents for change. He suggested they should not be trying to erase their children’s bad associations, but to help them form new ones. This week’s Special Feature looks at what he said and why.

Bruce Perry is a clinician and neuroscientist with a passion for helping traumatised people develop new ways of interacting with the world, supported by their families and communities.

An international expert on trauma, Perry visited Adoption UK in Northern Ireland to talk about his work to an audience of adoptive parents and professionals, and explain how it applies to the traumatised children with whom they live and work.

Dr Perry, stressed that adults are vital agents of change for children for whom early life has not been consistently positive and nurturing.

Senior Fellow of the Child Trauma Academy based in Houston, Texas, and author of The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing, Dr Perry’s presentations showed how relationships are vital for all human beings.

He explained how relationships can be more effective in bringing about real change for people who have experienced trauma than medication or ‘one hour per week’ therapy.

He described attachment as a memory, a set of associations with a clear neurological basis. A key part of early experience in the womb is that the environment provides patterned, repetitive sensory stimulation which helps organise the developing brain.

Dr Perry said the brain is a conservative system which regards all novel stimuli as potentially threatening. He said: “the brain does not like surprises”. When the brain does experience a “surprise” it responds by becoming aroused – and experiences a stress response.

For children who have experienced consistent parenting, this response is likely to be a low-level one, but for children who have experienced inconsistency or trauma, their response might be one of extreme stress.

Following birth, babies need a parent to regulate their stress externally. There are three key attributes of a good enough carer:

· to be present

· to be attuned/attentive

· to respond

A responsive parent not only soothes a baby and meets its basic needs for food, warmth, removal of discomfort (decreasing its physiological distress) but also rewards the child by stimulating the pleasure centres of the baby's brain.

These two benefits of responsive parenting create associations in the baby’s brain which reinforce the idea that the parent is reliable and trustworthy as well as being a source of soothing and pleasure.

This in turn helps the child develop resilience and the ability to cope with further stress – and ultimately to regulate their own response to stress.

Children who do not experience consistent, responsive parenting early in their life may enter a state of high arousal more frequently and remain there longer. This leads to the development of a ‘template’ or group of associations in which the child views the world as a stressful, hostile place.

So a child who ‘expects’ to be shouted at and criticised will be confused when faced by an adoptive parent who treats them with fairness and respect. Their brain tells them ‘this is not the way the world should work’ and they continue to behave in a way which may eventually provoke the ‘expected’ response.

Dr Perry stressed that erasing the ‘bad’ associations a child has formed is not what we as adoptive parents should be seeking to do.

We should be making new ‘default’ templates for our child – encouraging the brain to form new synaptic connections between neurons, new pathways and new associations.

How do we do this? By rhythmic, patterned, repetitive activity, which works in a similar way to that which helped organise the brain in the womb.

This is why dance, massage, rocking and other similar activities are so beneficial to children who have had early experiences which have prevented them from developing good self-regulation of stress responses.

Dr Perry also showed how brain functions can be ‘mapped’ for an individual and how the resulting ‘map’ can be used to design specific interventions to help the person improve those functions which are under-developed or absent due to gaps or inconsistencies in early experiences.

Further details of this and other aspects of Dr Perry’s presentation will be available in the June edition of Adoption Today.