The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

implications.

    And understanding this concept, I came to believe, was key to understanding children like Tina. She had developed a very unfortunate set of associations because she was sexually abused so early in life. Her first experiences with men and her teenage male abuser were what shaped her conception of what men are and how to act toward them; early experiences with those around us mold all of our worldviews. Because of the enormous amount of information the brain is confronted with daily, we must use these patterns to predict what the world is like. If early experiences are aberrant, these predictions may guide our behavior in dysfunctional ways. In Tina’s world males larger than she was were frightening, demanding creatures who forced her or her mother into sex. The scent, sight and sounds associated with them came together to compose a set of “memory templates” that she used to make sense of the world.
    And so, when she came into my office that first time and was alone in the company of an adult male, it was perfectly natural for her to assume that sex was what I wanted as well. When she went to school and exposed herself or tried to engage in sex play with other children, she was modeling what she knew about how to behave. She didn’t consciously think about it. It was just a set of behaviors that were part of her toxic associations, her twisted template for sexuality.
    Unfortunately, with only an hour a week of therapy, it was almost impossible to undo that set of associations. I could model the behavior of a different kind of adult male, I could show her that there were situations where sexual activity was inappropriate and help her learn to resist impulses, but I couldn’t, in such a small amount of time, replace the template that had been forged in the fresh tissue of her young brain, that had been burned in with patterned, repetitive early experience. I would need to integrate a lot more about how the human brain works, how the brain changes and the systems that interact in this learning into my treatments before I could even begin to do better for patients like Tina, patients whose lives and memories had been marred in multiple ways by early trauma.

chapter 2
    For Your Own Good
    â€œI NEED YOUR HELP.” The caller, Stan Walker,* was an attorney for the Public Guardian’s office in Cook County, Illinois. I had completed my training in child psychiatry and was now an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, still working at the clinic and running my lab. It was 1990.
    â€œI just inherited a case scheduled to go to trial next week,” he told me, explaining that it was a homicide. A three-year-old girl named Sandy had witnessed the murder of her own mother. Now, almost a year later, the prosecution wanted her to testify about it. “I’m concerned that this might be pretty overwhelming for her,” Stan went on, asking if I might be able to help prepare her for court.
    â€œPretty overwhelming?” I thought sarcastically to myself, “You think so?”
    Stan was a Guardian-ad-litem, an attorney appointed by the court to represent children in the legal system. In Cook County (where Chicago is located), the Public Guardian’s Office has a full-time staff to represent children in the child protective services (CPS) system. In almost all other communities this role is played by an appointed attorney who may or may not have experience and training in child law. Cook County had created the full-time positions in the noble hope that if the attorneys worked their cases full time, they could develop experience with children, learn about maltreatment and thus better serve those they represent. (Unfortunately,
like all other components of the child protective system, the volume of cases was overwhelming and the office was underfunded.)
    â€œWho is her therapist?” I asked, thinking that, someone familiar to the child would be much better suited to