Top 80 Bruce D. Perry Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “We ignore familiar patterns in ordinary contexts, so much so that we forget large portions of our days, which are spent doing routine things like brushing our teeth or getting dressed.”

— Bruce D. Perry

55. “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

56. “In Sandy’s case, milk, once associated with nurturing and nutrition, now became the stuff that spilled from her throat, that her mother “refused” as she lay dead. Silverware was now no longer something used to eat your food, but rather something that killed and maimed and horrified. And doorbells – well, that was what had started the whole thing: the ringing of the doorbell had announced the arrival of the killer.”

— Bruce D. Perry

57. “You’re not meant to raise children isolated and alone.”

— Bruce D. Perry

58. “They prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.”

— Bruce D. Perry

59. “One word the translators were able to figure out was that “Mum” meant “adult or caregiver,” just as similar sounds mean mother in almost every known human language, since the “mm” sound is the first one babies learn to make while suckling.”

— Bruce D. Perry

60. “Connectedness counters the pull of addictive behaviors. It is the key.”

— Bruce D. Perry

61. “I’d seen common elements of healing practices – most prominently, the use of rhythm and an emphasis on harmony with nature.”

— Bruce D. Perry

62. “The protective effects of social connection were present even for individuals who were at higher risk for depression as a result of genetic vulnerability or early life trauma.”

— Bruce D. Perry

63. “All of us tend to gravitate to the familiar, even when the familiar is unhealthy or destructive. We are drawn to what we were raised with.”

— Bruce D. Perry

64. “It is not unusual for children to be deceptive or withholding or to purposefully lie in order to avoid things they don’t want to share, especially when they have been instructed to do so by their families. However, it is far more difficult for them to hide their true thoughts and feelings in their artwork.”

— Bruce D. Perry

65. “Human social life is built on this ability to “reflect” each other and respond to those reflections, with both positive and negative results.”

— Bruce D. Perry

66. “Therapy is more about building new associations, making new, healthier default pathways. It is almost as if therapy is taking your two-lane dirt road and building a four-lane freeway alongside it. The old road stays, but you don’t use it much anymore.”

— Bruce D. Perry

67. “We have talked a lot about how the actions of caregivers influence the child, but it’s important to remember that those caregivers were also children influenced by their caregivers. The effects of trauma stretch far and wide across generations and across communities, and it’s important to always come back to our central question with compassion: What happened to you?”

— Bruce D. Perry

68. “What we call “cuteness” is actually an evolutionary adaptation that helps ensure that parents will care for their children, that babies will get their needs met, and that parents will take on this seemingly thankless task with pleasure.”

— Bruce D. Perry

69. “The most traumatic aspects of all disasters involve the shattering of human connections.”

— Bruce D. Perry

70. “I believe we don’t have enough quiet conversational moments listening to a friend with no other distractions. That kind of interaction leads to a completely different quality of human connection. A different depth.”

— Bruce D. Perry

71. “Adrenaline increases the sugar in your blood. Her stress response, overactivated by the recent trauma, increased her adrenaline – hence much more sugar in her blood. The dose of insulin that had worked in the past was no longer adequate. Furthermore, when she was exposed to any evocative cue, such as the sirens, her sensitized system had an overreaction, releasing very high levels of adrenaline and, in turn, leading to a huge release of sugar.”

— Bruce D. Perry

72. “What you are pointing out is how adaptive it is to dissociate in many situations. If a soldier in combat simply went down the arousal continuum-and got to the flee and then fight stages-he would jump up and get shot. In order to maintain access to parts of his cortex-to think and behave in the ways he was trained to keep him alive in combat-he needs to dissociate to a certain degree.”

— Bruce D. Perry

73. “What happened to you as an infant has a profound impact on this capacity to love and be loved.”

— Bruce D. Perry

74. “Many of us found it harder to “fill up” during the COVID-19 pandemic; people reported more anxiety and depression, and many people used some of the less healthy forms of reward to fill that void.”

— Bruce D. Perry

75. “The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged. As psychologist Virginia Satir puts it, we feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty. Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar.”

— Bruce D. Perry

76. “In older children and adults massage has also been found to lower blood pressure, fight depression, and cut stress by reducing the amount of stress hormones released by the brain.”

— Bruce D. Perry

77. “This is one of the central problems in our society; we have too many parents caring for children with inadequate supports.”

— Bruce D. Perry

78. “In order to function socially, people need to develop what is known as a “theory of mind.”

— Bruce D. Perry

79. “When the attentive and responsive adult comes to the crying infant, two very important things happen. The baby feels the pleasure of being regulated after being distressed – and also experiences the sight, smell, touch, sound, and movement of human interaction.”

— Bruce D. Perry

80. “You love others the way you’ve been loved.”

— Bruce D. Perry

81. “Parenting is difficult. Without the neurobiological capacity to feel the joys of parenting, irritations and annoyances loom especially large.”

— Bruce D. Perry

82. “To create an effective “memory” and increase strength, experience has to be patterned and repetitive.”

— Bruce D. Perry

83. “Indeed, if moderate, predictable and patterned, it is stress that makes a system stronger and more functionally capable.”

— Bruce D. Perry

84. “When we get back into balance, we feel better. Relief of distress – getting back into balance – activates the reward networks in the brain. We feel pleasure when we get back into balance – from cold to warm, thirsty to quenched, hungry to satiated.”

— Bruce D. Perry

85. “While this doesn’t mean that smart children need less affection, it does suggest that if they are deprived, brighter kids may be better equipped to cope.”

— Bruce D. Perry