Customer Reviews

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

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Assisted by a talented science writer, child psychiatrist Bruce Perry presents a series of heartbreaking stories of children severely damaged by trauma. But that's only one side of this remarkable book. The other side is how many of these profoundly damaged children were assisted to heal.

Perry explains his "neurosequential" approach that sequentially targets brain regions left undeveloped by abuse or neglect. He presents compelling cases to illustrate how the child's age at the time of the abuse or neglect will determine the gaps in neurological development and how his interventions sequentially target those developmental gaps. For children whose brains were stalled out in infancy, for example, therapy may start with healing touch or rhythm before moving on to higher brain activities.

The focus, always, is on the child's humanity. Perry explains the importance of listening and letting the child set the pace. He warns of the damage caused by well-intentioned but poorly trained therapists who push children to open up, or who administer punitive interventions in the guise of treatment. Healing is not about a specific technique administered in cookbook fashion but, rather, about love, and restoring shattered human connections.

This is an enlightening and heartening book and a real page-turner to boot. The neurological underpinnings of the trauma theory are presented in clear English accessible to anyone who can read. If you're a mental health professional, psychologist, or psychiatrist, you'll love this book. If you're a parent or a teacher, it's also for you. Whoever you are, it's for you. I guarantee you will be engaged and inspired.

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...

This was a book I had a hard time putting down. The author is obviously highly intelligent and compassionate. After reading it, I want to read more by him, but it appears only articles--no books--are available. The book, without going into too much medicalese, explains how the brain is affected by trauma. The true life stories coupled with neurological explanations offer hope to those who have been traumatized and those who would understand them. I was astonished by the last chapter--or maybe it was one of the last?--that presented, for me, a novel way of influencing a child's peer group.

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.

This book is quite informative about children exposed to or the subject of trauma and abuse and how it affects their brains and their behavior. It is written so the lay person can understand what the author is conveying. It has been compelling reading for me. It makes one very mindful of the importance of protecting children from seeing or experiencing violence, abuse, and/or trauma.

I am a therapist who works with families and children who have suffered trauma. I found this book to be incredibly moving, inspiring and insightful. I particularly recommend this book to parents who are thinking about adopting an older child (non-infant), and professionals who work with traumatized children. While some of these types of books are downers, and there certainly are some sad stories involved, this book is really about hope. Dr. Perry outlines what these children need to do well, what parents and professionals can do to help, and where they often fall short. He really helps us understand exactly how trauma affects children and how it stunts or delays their emotional development. Again, these children have hope. They are not doomed to become criminals and abusers. We need to start listening to people like Bruce Perry if we want to help them heal while they still have a chance.

I have told numerous people about this book already. It is a great book with insight into what is necessary to be human in this mixed-up world. It is a sign of hope and offers an incredible new way of thinking about children, their environment and their brain. Dr. Perry has developed a new therapy "Neurosequential Model (NMT)" that offers a challenge to the traditional modes of therapy used by social workers, psychologists, etc. Taking both the environment AND the brain (nature and nurture) into consideration, he explains how he has attempted to re-train the brains of children who have faced severe trauma - with amazing results. He reminds us that change IS possible and that your history does not necessarily have to be your future! In the beginning, the book is a bit heavy on the science side of things (in order to give an intro to how the brain works) -which was a turn-off for me. However, after reading a few chapters it is easy to understand why the beginning heaviness is necessary to understand the rest of the book. This is an exciting time to be watching the field of trauma. Dr. Perry's work is revolutionary and the time has come for us to rethink how we treat trauma and other 'diagnosable' issues.
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and I really could understand how the treatments in this book (and Dr. Perry's therapy) could work on children with all types of diagnoses - not just trauma. Once we start thinking about how the brain is involved with various diagnoses and how to treat THAT, the possibilities seem almost endless... I just wish I could learn more about it and make it available to the clients I am working with in rural Alaska! Even if you are not in this field, this book is important and a great educator on 'what makes us the way we are' and how to think about changing that.

There are plenty of books out there that tell the horror stories of traumatized children, and it is for this reason that I have avoided reading them for years. A lot of books like this border on sensationalizing these stories. This is not one of those books. I cannot tell you how impactful reading this book was for me. The heart of this book lies as much in the broken hearts of the children in the stories as it is in the passion of the author, Dr. Perry, to help them. His approach to treating traumatized children should be how all people approach children in general.

I have often thought that Attachment theory could answer a lot of the problems our society faces. This book offers a very unique and creative approach to fixing that problem. That isn't to say that this book is about attachment theory, but it is about the importance of relationships within the context of community. Each story in this book lays out an underpinning of how a relationship can fail a child with disastrous consequences, and how a nurturing relationship can impact more than just the individual child.

Just based on this book and my own work in therapy and with preschool children I can tell you that Dr. Perry's unique neurosequential approach to therapy makes sense, and I wouldn't doubt that it works. I loved how he laid out the book approaching different areas of the brain with each case. While I personally would've loved more indepth descriptions of how the trauma affected certain areas of the brain and more specific underlying neuroscience behind the treatments...I can appreciate how this book is written. It is not muddled down in science or technical terminology. It has enough science to be intriguing but it is written so anyone can read and understand how trauma effects a child's brain, and despite my own scientific interests, making this information accessible to everyone is extremely important. I loved that aspect about this book. (but perhaps one day he'll put out a supplemental book for us neuroscience geeks!) The format of this book is also very well laid out. The beginning stories are a bit more harsh to read, and some don't have the happiest of endings, but through each story Dr. Perry expresses what he learned from each case and relates it back to previous chapters or other similar stories and how it has continually shaped his approach. The second half of the book makes you feel very hopeful and optimistic as the stories just as harsh in nature turn out very differently in the end. It's a wonderful approach to writing a book like this. It left me feeling very disheartened, but hopeful every time I put it down (which was hard to do).

Another thing that I really, really appreciated about this book is that Dr. Perry is a very well known child trauma specialist, and he has a website with all kinds of training programs and different things he could have potentially pushed in this book. I cannot tell you how much it annoys me to read a book with a topic like this and the book is full of a the author pushing a product or an agenda. I had to actually research Dr. Perry to find out that he even offered training programs because none of it is mentioned in this book. The agenda of this book is children and trauma, and he sticks to that topic with more compassionate resolve than any book I've ever read. This is a fantastic book that should not be missed and I join with the rest of the reviewers on here in insisting that this be read by every parent, educator, social worker, therapist, psychologist, coach, television producer, and human alive. Great book. One of the best I've ever read.

After reading just half of the book, I was not only aching with anger for all the parents and situations that these children have had to endure, but I quickly had to go and purchase a few other copies for friends and relatives. As a child care professional myself, it was recommended by one of my colleagues, and well Bruce Perry is one psychiatrist I choose to hold in very high esteem. I feel that there is one psychiatrist who is opening the eyes to all people who work or parent or love children. One psychiatrist out of the millions we have working today, why did it take so long? Perry's approach has finally proven to be successful due to the simple need in all of us to love and be loved. Nurturance, tolerance, and learning through the senses are the basic needs each and every one of us needs to live.

Initially when I ordered this book, I thought the whole book about a boy raised by dogs. I soon found out it was the experiences of a beloved shrink who deals with troubled, very troubled children and how he helped them. It can be somewhat depressing to read, but nevertheless is very compelling. Makes you realize how easily children can be damaged by poor or cruel parenting.