Face-to-face, human-to-human interactions are physiological events.

Without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than any plan of action. The first thing we need to be aware of is what we bring to the relationship. What we don’t deal with in ourselves is what we pass onto our kids.

“If you don’t understand relational things, you’re never going to figure out healthcare problems; you’re never going to figure out mental health problems; you’re never going to figure out social health problems; you’re never going to figure out the educational system. It’s all about relationships. If you don’t understand relational neurobiology, you’re screwed. You will tinker around the edges of solving these problems but you will never get to the core.”

Dr. Bruce Perry, “Born For Love, Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6kDeBaJi0M&t=2086

“This is something that makes me say that it is as important for us to think intentionally and deliberately about creating a social-emotional, relationally-enriched curriculum as it is to develop curriculum around science and math and engineering. In fact I would argue that it’s more essential that we develop intentional opportunities for relational enrichment in the lives of our children in order to express their potential.”

“There’s a cost to the choices we’ve made in the way that we’ve created our lives. The typical American child today, not in an abusive environment, at the age of 15, has had the same number of social emotional learning opportunities that 3 decades before would have been typical of a child of 6. In other words, we have 18-year-old kids who have the cognitive skills of 18-year-olds but the social/emotional skills of a six-year-old.”

“If your brain is primed to respond to everything as if it’s a threat, a teacher who comes up to you and tries to be kind, your brain will go, “What do you want from me?” as opposed to “Let me listen to you.” And that leads to this cascade of problems that just magnifies as you get older. . . the older the child gets, and the more they struggle with these things, the more the adult world misunderstands this behavior. So, instead of saying your inattention and your aggressive behavior is because of what happened to you, it’s because you have some other problem, so we’re going to punish you and exclude you and it literally leads to this viscous, negative cycle of misunderstanding, and then to actions on the part of the adult world that further traumatize that child . . .

“In the lower part of the brain we have these regulatory networks involved in the stress response, and when they’re activated, and you feel under threat,  you shut down the top part of your brain. And so, if you want to teach a child that has trauma-related dysregulation, you’re going to have to figure out how to regulate them before you talk to them about geography or math. All of the things we are trying to get to the top parts of the brain, they’re never going to get there unless we first address the altered stress-response systems of the lower brain.”