Top 80 Bruce D. Perry Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.”

— Bruce D. Perry

2. “Relationships matter: the currency for systemic change was trust, and trust comes through forming healthy working relationships. People, not programs, change people.”

— Bruce D. Perry

3. “The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.”

— Bruce D. Perry

4. “Fire can warm or consume, water can quench or drown, wind can caress or cut. And so it is with human relationships: we can both create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other.”

— Bruce D. Perry

5. “It is the rare and strong person that can carry their trauma without having it spill into the next generation.”

— Bruce D. Perry

6. “Your connectedness to other people is so key to buffering any current stressor – and to healing from past trauma. Being with people who are present, supportive, and nurturing. Belonging.”

— Bruce D. Perry

7. “Empathy underlies virtually everything that makes society work – like trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity. Failure to empathize is a key part of most social problems – crime, violence, war, racism, child abuse, and inequity, to name just a few.”

— Bruce D. Perry

8. “One of the few things I knew for sure by then about traumatized children was that they need predictability, routine, a sense of control and stable relationships with supportive people.”

— Bruce D. Perry

9. “All life is rhythmic. The rhythms of the natural world are embedded in our biological systems. This begins in the womb, when the mother’s beating heart creates rhythmic sound, pressure, and vibrations that are sensed by the developing fetus and provide constant rhythmic input to the organizing brain.”

— Bruce D. Perry

10. “Rhythm is regulating.”

— Bruce D. Perry

11. “There is a direct relationship between a person’s degree of social isolation and their risk for physical and mental health problems.”

— Bruce D. Perry

12. “To develop a self one must exercise choice and learn from the consequences of those choices; if the only thing you are taught is to comply, you have little way of knowing what you like and want.”

— Bruce D. Perry

13. “Connectedness regulates and rewards us.”

— Bruce D. Perry

14. “Our ancestors recognized the importance of connectedness and the toxicity of exclusion. The history of the “civilized” world, on the other hand, is filled with policies and practices that favored disconnection and marginalization – that destroyed family, community, and culture.”

— Bruce D. Perry

15. “Negative emotions often make things even more memorable than positive ones because recalling things that are threatening – and avoiding those situations in the future if possible – is often critical to survival.”

— Bruce D. Perry

16. “Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity ad well.”

— Bruce D. Perry

17. “The core lessons these children have taught me are relevant for us all. Because in order to understand trauma we need to understand memory. In order to appreciate how children heal we need to understand how they learn to love, how they cope with challenge, how stress affects them. And by recognizing the destructive impact that violence and threat can have on the capacity to love and work, we can come to better understand ourselves and to nurture the people in our lives, especially the children.”

— Bruce D. Perry

18. “Human social life is built on this ability to “reflect” each other and respond to those reflections, with both positive and negative results. For example, if you are feeling great and go to work where your supervisor is in a vile mood, soon you will probably feel lousy, too. If a teacher becomes angry or frustrated, the children in her classroom may begin to misbehave, reflecting the powerful emotion being expressed by the teacher. To calm a frightened child, you must first calm yourself.”

— Bruce D. Perry

19. “You can’t give what you don’t have.”

— Bruce D. Perry

20. “Balance is the core of health. We feel and function best when our body’s systems are in balance, and when we’re in balance with friends, family, community, and nature.”

— Bruce D. Perry

21. “We elicit from the world what we project into the world; but what you project is based upon what happened to you as a child.”

— Bruce D. Perry

22. “In fact, the research on the most effective treatments to help child trauma victims might be accurately summed up this way: what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child’s life.”

— Bruce D. Perry

23. “Reducing economic inequality and helping victims of domestic violence and child abuse are critical if we want to cut violence and crime.”

— Bruce D. Perry

24. “What I’ve learned from talking to so many victims of traumatic events, abuse, or neglect is that after absorbing these painful experiences, the child begins to ache. A deep longing to feel needed, validated, and valued begins to take hold. As these children grow, they lack the ability to set a standard for what they deserve. And if that lack is not addressed, what often follows is a complicated, frustrating pattern of self-sabotage, violence, promiscuity, or addiction.”

— Bruce D. Perry

25. “Across generations, wariness of new individuals, groups, and ideas was built into the circuits of the human brain’s alarm response because those who had this wariness were more likely to survive to reproduce. It was just safer to assume danger- and expect the worst- than to count on the kindness of strangers.”

— Bruce D. Perry

26. “The risks for heart disease, stroke, depression, diabetes, asthma, and even many cancers are all affected by trauma-related changes in the stress response system. Empathy and connection affect physical – not just mental – wellness and health.”

— Bruce D. Perry

27. “Why do money and possessions so rarely bring the happiness we expect? Because they often distance us from one another, rather than bringing us closer, emphasizing status gaps, not narrowing them. And, finally, what causes much of life’s most agonizing pain? This, too, is related to relationships – those we lose, fail to maintain, or that become one-sided or abusive.”

— Bruce D. Perry

28. “Our children live in a culture of endless cries of “think of the children” – and attend schools that are crumbling, overcrowded, understaffed, and short on necessary supplies. They hear again and again about “family values” – but see their parents struggle to pay for health care or childcare, often isolated from family and friends and disconnected from neighbors. They hear talk about caring and sharing – but see around them mainly fear, arguments based on personal attacks, and competition.”

— Bruce D. Perry

29. “The brain needs patterned, repetitive stimuli to develop properly.”

— Bruce D. Perry

30. “What happened to you?” is so important in understanding what’s going on with you now.”

— Bruce D. Perry

31. “The fact that the brain develops sequentially – and also so rapidly in the first years of life – explains why extremely young children are at such great risk of suffering lasting effects of trauma: their brains are still developing. The same miraculous plasticity that allows young brains to quickly learn love and language, unfortunately, also makes them highly susceptible to negative experiences as well.”

— Bruce D. Perry

32. “As you learn anything, in fact, your brain is constantly checking current experience against stored templates – essentially memory – of previous, similar situations and sensations, asking “Is this new?” and “Is this something I need to attend to?”

— Bruce D. Perry

33. “The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation. I.”

— Bruce D. Perry

34. “Our conscious memory is full of gaps, of course, which is actually a good thing. Our brains filter out the ordinary and expected, which is utterly necessary to allow us to function. When you drive, for example, you rely automatically on your previous experiences with cars and roads; if you had to focus on every aspect of what your senses are taking in, you’d be overwhelmed and would probably crash.”

— Bruce D. Perry

35. “Social connection builds resilience, and resilience helps create post-traumatic wisdom, and that wisdom leads to hope. Hope for you and hope for others witnessing and participating in your healing, hope for your community.”

— Bruce D. Perry

36. “This is incredibly unlike our modern world. We expect a single working mother to be the one to throw the baseball with her eight-year-old, rock the newborn, read to the three-year-old, and, by the way, cook a nutritious meal, help with homework, do the laundry, get everyone to bed, then wake up and get them all ready for childcare and school so she can go work all day, only to rush home to do it all again. All alone.”

— Bruce D. Perry

37. “Although I do not mean to imply that all of these children will be severely “damaged” by these experiences, the most moderate estimates suggest that at any given time, more than eight million American children suffer from serious, diagnosable, trauma-related psychiatric problems. Millions more experience less serious but still distressing consequences.”

— Bruce D. Perry

38. “As one family therapist famously put it, we tend to prefer the “certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.”

— Bruce D. Perry

39. “The elders were very patient with my curiosity, and gently amused at my Western medical-model formulations of “disease” when I asked how they handled depression, sleep problems, drug abuse, and trauma. They kept trying to help me understand that these problems were all basically the “same thing.” The problems were all interconnected. In Western psychiatry we like to separate them, but that misses the true essence of the problem. We are chasing symptoms, not healing people.”

— Bruce D. Perry

40. “Oprah: She needs people to step up – people who support her, give her some breaks, step in and do some of those things with her children. We’re not meant to be isolated and alone. We’re actually meant to work together. So when a single mom is living on a limited income, trying to manage four children, trying to be mother and father, and she feels overwhelmed or feels like it’s impossible to do it all – it’s because it is impossible.”

— Bruce D. Perry

41. “Your past is not an excuse. But it is an explanation – offering insight into the questions so many of us ask ourselves: Why do I behave the way I behave? Why do I feel the way I do? For me, there is no doubt that our strengths, vulnerabilities, and unique responses are an expression of what happened to us.”

— Bruce D. Perry

42. “Drugs and alcohol are not my problem,” he wrote. “Reality is my problem, drugs and alcohol are my solution.”

— Bruce D. Perry

43. “Like people who learn a foreign language later in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent.”

— Bruce D. Perry

44. “Humans are social animals, highly susceptible to emotional contagion. Training, logic, and intelligence are often no match for the power of groupthink.”

— Bruce D. Perry

45. “Because what I know for sure is that everything that has happened to you was also happening for you. And all that time, in all of those moments, you were building strength. Strength times strength times strength equals power. What happened to you can be your power. – Oprah.”

— Bruce D. Perry

46. “In fact, some theories of language development suggest that humans learned to dance and sing before we could talk, that music was actually the first human language.”

— Bruce D. Perry

47. “Social networking sites can link us to distant relatives and friends with whom we might otherwise lose touch. These contacts and the emotions they engage are real. And when online social networks or games add to face-to-face relationships – rather than substitute for them – they can improve our relatedness and compassion.”

— Bruce D. Perry

48. “When you drive, for example, you rely automatically on your previous experiences with cars and roads; if you had to focus on every aspect of what your senses are taking in, you’d be overwhelmed and would probably crash. As you learn anything, in fact, your brain is constantly checking current experience against stored templates – essentially memory – of previous, similar situations and sensations, asking “Is this new?” and “Is this something I need to attend to?”

— Bruce D. Perry

49. “Neural systems have evolved to be especially sensitive to novelty, since new experiences usually signal either danger or opportunity. One of the most important characteristics of both memory, neural tissue, and of development, then, is that they all change with patterned, repetitive activity. So, the systems in your brain that get repeatedly activated will change, and the systems in your brain that don’t get activated won’t change.”

— Bruce D. Perry

50. “Through moderate, predictable challenges our stress response systems are activated moderately. This makes for a resilient, flexible stress response capacity. The stronger stress response system in the present is the one that has had moderate, patterned stress in the past.”

— Bruce D. Perry