The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing

This is a powerful and insightful book. The patient stories are genuine and heart-wrenching, and the lessons about the human brain and its development ring true and offer refreshing and valuable perspectives on how the mind works. Dr. Perry shows, with a lucid honesty that belies any crass self-promotion, his therapeutic mastery. At the same time, the prose flows smoothly and I found myself easily drawn in to the very personal stories of these troubled children. In many cases I felt a palpable relief at the happy endings, in which a few basic insights into the core psychological issues led to a beneficial and effective course of therapy. I only wish the book was longer — I devoured it quickly and could have happily read many more chapters! My only question now is who to lend it to first…
Rating: 5 / 5
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing

Erik Erikson’s -Childhood and Society-. Don Winnicott’s -The Child, The Family and The Outside World-. Alice Miller’s -For Your Own Good-. Three books about growing up in Western Culture. Three books the average guy could understand. Three watersheds.

This could be — and -should- be — the fourth.

I have been reading Perry’s professional work for a decade. Along with Daniel Stern (-The Motherhood Constellation-) and Alan Schore (-Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self-), he stands with the giants of early life neurobiology, infant-mother bonding and socialization in the millennial era. For me, his work harks back an entire century to the simple and forthright illuminations of the recently rediscovered Pierre Janet.

I may routinely recommend the mass market work of people like Pia Mellody, Claudia Black and Scott Peck in -their- heydays; usefully dramatic expositions of vital concepts tend to flip my switch. This thing flipped it over, and over, and over again. A brief sample may help others to understand why:

“For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support… People without any relationships were believed to be as healthy as those who had many. These ideas contradict the fundamental biology of the human species: we are social mammals and could never have survived without deeply interconnected and interdependent human contact.

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

“In order for a child to become kind, giving and empathetic, he needs to be treated that way. Punishment can’t create or model those qualities. Although we do need to set limits, if we want our children to behave well, we have to treat them well.”

Perry buttresses his case with presentation after presentation from casework involving neglected, invalidated, brainwashed, ignored and hoodwinked young humans “raised” in extremist religious cults, Eastern European orphanages, broken chromosome backwaters and even animal cages. He shows us how children raised in seemingly “normal” homes can have every reason to be as confused and disoriented as his more obvious worst-case-scenarios. And he shows us how developmentally appropriate re-parenting (more or less the fundament of the Adult Children of Alcoholics movement) can and will produce near miracles.

Social impact seems to require drama. Miller’s work in the ’80s crashed through the gates of denial on child abuse after decades of factually solid but less dramatic publication. Perry’s first-hand experience with the surviving children of the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, and the tragically mistaken “satanic cult” furball in rural Gilmer, Texas, make the most of memorable headlines from recent years.

Drama, however, is only a means to an end. The message is what matters.

And the message is simply -this-: The love of the mother is not merely significant, it is the Single Most Important Learning Experience in human life. Those who miss it, or suffer through some twisted version of it like Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy or parenting by those who experienced none of their own, are doomed to all the shattered trust, push-pull autonomy, corrupted initiative, shipwrecked identity and incapacity for intimacy Erikson promised us a half century ago.

If there is a potential fault here, it is that Perry’s illustrations -are- both extreme and dramatic. Many may fail to see that less extreme and dramatic results of Miller’s “poisonous pedagogy,” Diana Baumrind’s “permissive-abandoning parenting” and John Bowlby’s “anxious attachment” are rapidly becoming our societal norms.

As Perry points out, “A person born in 1905 had only a one-percent chance of suffering depression by the age of seventy-five, but by their twenty-fourth birthday, six percent of those born in 1955 had an episode of serious depression. Other studies indicate that teen depression rates have increased by an incredible factor of ten in recent decades.”

It is clear to those of us who work with these people that Janet was on top of it all a century ago. Few paid attention to his revelations about the “normal practice of destroying our children and our society” then. Let us hope more will pay attention now.
Rating: 5 / 5
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing