Episode 370: From Trauma to Regulation to Resilience with Neurobiologist Dr. Bruce Perry

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It's time to turn those what ifs into... With Shopify Today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com. Go to Shopify.com. That's Shopify.com. Hey, friends. Welcome to the Raising Boys and Girls podcast. I'm Sissy Goff. And I'm David Thomas. And we're so glad you've joined us for this conversation. Let's dive in. Over the last 30 years, Dr. Bruce Perry has been an active teacher, clinician and researcher in children's mental health. His work on the impact of abuse, neglect and trauma on the developing brain has impacted clinical practice programs and policy across the world. Dr. Perry is the author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, a bestselling book based on his work with maltreated children and Born for Love, Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered. Dr. Perry's most recent book, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing co-authored with Oprah Winfrey has been translated into 26 languages and has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over 100 weeks after becoming number one on the list in April of 2021. You all stick around at the end of the conversation. He talks about this magic equation of being parallel and patient. It's incredible. He doesn't just talk about what it is. He talks about practical ways to do it. You are going to love this conversation. Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here. I look forward to the conversation and I have to say I get a little bit too much credit for that language about changing the way you view things from what's wrong with you to what happened to you. The origin of that phrase was in a colleague of mine's clinical team many years ago as they were beginning to integrate a more developmental trauma-informed perspective to their clinical work. As I think most of us in the mental health field know, and actually most parents and most people who are trying to understand anybody else's behavior, you look at the moment, look at what somebody is doing right now and you go, what's wrong with you? Why are you acting that way? We do that in mental health. In fact, our whole DSM is all about what's wrong with you in the last few weeks. You meet this criteria and you have sleep problems and you're depressed and you have voices and that's like what's wrong with you. We give you a label. What they were recognizing, and this is something that our group and many others had been working on for years, was that the really the more important question is how did you get to this point such that you are inattentive or struggling or depressed or whatever it is? Rather than just saying, oh, you have some label, we want to understand the pathway, the trajectory. How did you get here? Because we think that that will give us really important understandings about where do we go from here? Because the pathway to the present gives you lots of important clues about the best road forward towards health. That team, including Sandy Bloom and a few other people in our field, started to use that when they were teaching to bigger groups about instead of saying what's wrong with what's wrong with you. They were like, I'm going to go to somebody. Just take a pause, be a little bit curious, try to understand how they got to this point and that will serve you much better in your work. As a parent, I find myself, I can't tell you how often I've said, man, what's wrong with you? Why are you acting this way? Even though, I mean, I read the book. I do it. That sort of developmental perspective is something that is, it takes practice and intentional reflection to really do that. Because again, it's not at all unusual, considering the way our brain works, for us to be really preoccupied with the moment and what's going on right now. It's interesting because one of the biggest issues in clinical work is looking at, sort of looking at what you're presented with, what are the issues, what's the current problem, and what's the history of the current issue. A lot of times, we will miss the really important historical antecedents. For example, in the area of adoption, there are so many parents who've adopted kids when they're very, very, very young, and then their problems, their struggles with learning or relationships or whatever they're struggling with don't show up until they're seven, eight, or nine. It just doesn't even enter the minds of a lot of people to think that the origins of that challenge came from an intrauterine exposure to a drug, for example. Again, I find myself having to slow down, back up, and intentionally think in a developmental way. That's kind of what our whole clinical approach is all about, really honoring somebody's story, getting to know them. Where are you from? Then even what's really very, very helpful with that is where are you folks from? Where did you grow up? What's the culture you grew up in? What's the belief system that you have? Again, all of those things end up being really helpful in, number one, forming a healthy relationship with the person you're trying to help. Then number two, being a good detective about what you're looking at. I rambled on and on. I hope you don't. We're going to get through about four of those questions. So valuable. Thank you. It is. Certainly feels more hopeful too. And thinking, going back to the word trauma, you talked about that and we hear that word a lot today, sometimes accurately, sometimes not so accurately. We would love for you to talk about how you define trauma in a way that helps parents and professionals both hold the term with both clarity and respect and even to talk about why misusing the word matters. Right. I'm so glad you brought that up because it's one of those funny things. When I was younger in the field, you guys probably, you're not that old, but I'm sure you remember a time when even within the mental health world, trauma was not thought about that much or written about that much. There were a few people, but it wasn't that much. But now it permeates the culture. Right. And people talk about trauma if they went to the grocery store and they didn't have the bread they wanted. Oh my God, I was so traumatic. I wanted to make a special bread pudding for Tom and they didn't have the bread. I had to go to four different stores. What a day. Traumatize. That's right. Bread pudding trauma. It's a real issue. So part of what I've tried to be really careful about is the use of that language. Because as you have, you've really seen people who've had horrific experiences. Yeah. And the word trauma has meaning for them. And to have them feel like you're putting their experience on the same kind of equivalent level as somebody who was disappointed or stressed or had to be inconvenienced really is disrespectful, I think. Yes. And so I think that we really should clean up the way we use the language. And I think there are people like, you know, I think most of us who do this work keep trying to do that when we're out in the world. We kind of go, well, that may not be really traumatic. That's actually distressing. And I can see why you'd be upset. But that's not kind of the way we think about trauma. And I think that probably the best articulation about trauma came from a work group out of SAMHSA where they were trying to struggle with this. And it is something that we've actually struggled with professionally, as you guys know. We've struggled with defining it so much that it was, that was one of the major reasons that a lot of the trauma related diagnoses were rejected by the DSM committees. Because nobody could really define it to their satisfaction. And the, but the, I think the SAMHSA work group really came up with a useful way to think about trauma. The first one is the event, right? So the three, this, it's the 3E framework. So most of us could look at an event like, oh, there was a car accident where somebody died. You could go, wow, that's, that kind of sounds like that could be traumatic. And there can be a shooting or there could be an earthquake. There could be a really bad things that we see. The second part of the E when you're sort of thinking about the language of trauma is what's the experience of the person in the event, right? So you could conceive of somebody in an event that most people go, wow, that's traumatic, but they would not experience it as traumatic. Their stress response system might get activated, but it wouldn't be activated in an extreme and prolonged way. An example I use a lot is, you know, there's, there are school fires, right? Where firemen who are actually very comfortable, and I don't want to, it's not that they don't get stressed, but they know what they're doing in a school fire. They will go in and they will go through the motions of what they've been trained to do and they will experience the same fire. You know, they're not the same event as the kids who were in the classroom who got all upset and were marched out. And so internally the physiology of the firemen is going to be very different than the physiological reaction of the students. Yes. And, and then there's the long-term effects, you know. Does this immediate activation of your stress response and all the things that go with that, does it persist longer than a couple of months? You know, it's, it's completely normal to have this acute stress response where like, wow, you think about it and you have dreams about it and ruminations about it and there's a few evocative cues that make you think about it. But over time, you kind of get back to your baseline and unless it's sort of thrown in your face in an unpredictable way, you just don't, it doesn't interfere with your life, basically. And so that's, that's like, that's kind of a useful way for me to think about it. We have kids, for example, let's give, let's use the school fire example. There will be kids in that event who were marched out of the classroom and the teacher stayed calm. They went out and they watched their school burn or part of it burn up, right? And one of those kids is going to have a couple of weeks of like worrying about it and thinking about it and they'll get reassured and they'll get, go back to school and it'll, there may be some residue smell and some other things, but they kind of get back to baseline. And there may be one kid or two who really have a hard time sort of coping with it and they get escalated and escalated and escalated. And actually one of the major determinants of that is the way the parents respond. So if the parents are like, oh my God, oh Billy, that's why you must have been so scared and the kids are like, oh, yeah, I guess. Then they can literally escalate kids into developing trauma related symptoms. And there are studies that have been done on kids that are in the hospital who have life-threatening diseases, right? Cancer, for example. And if you look at the number of those kids who kind of go through this life-threatening experience and have painful procedures where there's a lot of unpredictability, things they don't control, there's a significant portion of them that develop PTSD. But 80% of the kids that actually get PTSD have parents who are extremely over anxious. And the remaining kids that don't develop PTSD, only 10% of those kids have an over anxious parent. And so if that, and again, this points to one of the most important parts of our work and other people's work is that relational connections buffer that the impact of these adverse experiences and can really be protective in the midst of a traumatic experience and the immediate aftermath. And then they can also create sort of the healing environment for people to successfully do the things that are required to heal after exposure to trauma. And again, this is stuff I'm sure you guys have talked about this, I'm sure, before in your show. But this, the thing that's so interesting for me is, again, I'm sort of still on the definition thing. For me, I think about this as a neurobiologist. And I think about, for me, what a traumatic event, what trauma is, is something that will push the stress response systems to a certain level of activation with a certain pattern of activity that will over time change the set point of that system, both the set point and the reactivity. And so under these circumstances, we see, for example, children who have ASD or autism symptoms, because of the way they process experience, they can essentially have a stress response activation that's really extreme and unpredictable for them. In a circumstance that you and I would go out, that should be fun. You go into the zoo. You know, you go into somebody's party, birthday party. But for them, that's just so sensory overloaded that they will literally have what I would call a sensitizing or trauma-like set of experiences that lead to the same physiological reactivity that somebody would see if there was a clear cut over trauma, like seeing a being in a shooting or something like that. And this, and again, that may not be a very popular perspective for the people that are PTSD folks that love the DSM. But for somebody who's interested in really what's going on with the physiology of a person in a way that will help you figure out how to help them, we've found that that formulation is really useful in understanding a lot of the symptoms and problems that kids that have kind of neurodiverse sensory processing. So when you understand that, you can go, wow, this presentation isn't from autism. This is a sensitized stress response. And so we need to help create a safe, predictable, controllable environment for this child. And that will give them the opportunity to kind of, through neuroplasticity, get back to their baseline. And then they can make some really significant development of progress in the areas where their autism has impacted their development. And now we're going to take a little break to hear from one of our sponsors who makes this podcast possible. I heard someone the other day say that now that they are in their 50s, they finally understand why older people got so excited about winning appliances on the price is right. I never dreamed I could feel so passionate about a mattress and a pillow. Me too. I have so much passion and so many opinions about those two things. We're on book tour right now and listen. We expected we'd miss our families and our dogs. What we did not expect was to miss our Casper mattress and pillows like this. The first night in a hotel, I literally said, this is fine. It was not fine. I miss my Casper mattress. And I miss my Casper pillows. 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And essentially, it's, you know, the analogy I use, and it's been used a lot, but it's like if you think about exercise and weightlifting. When you lift weights, you are stressing, you're providing a moderate, predictable stressor for your muscles. And it sends a signal to those muscle cells that, hey, you're going to be doing more than just holding a pencil. So you need to build some muscle. And this is the wonderful thing about our body is tremendously adaptive to the circumstances that we're living in. So if you happen to be doing work that involves, you know, your hands, your hands will get stronger and you'll be able to do manual manipulations better. If you happen to be like, I mean, I was talking the other day about my uncles who were farmers never went to a gym in their lives, but they were strong and fit. And I was like, that was a really good athlete in high school. And we would go hunting with them, goose hunting, because up on their farm, and they would in, you know, work boots, they would run through fields faster than I could go. And I could, I would be huffing and puffing, and they wouldn't even have broken a sweat. And as I, it's because of they had built this tremendous cardio respiratory fitness and strength, because all day long, they were moving and doing work and telling their body that, hey, you have to lift heavy things. And hey, you have to use your legs to do all this stuff. So I was sending my body a weird signal that like, you know, you're just going to hang around and then work really hard for a couple of hours. So it's a very, it's interesting that the way our, our body and our brain does this. So if you want to get better at anything, when children are learning how to stand, they stress their, their body, their body is getting a stress signal. It's stressful. It's, it's novel information. It's new information, young systems are being acted, asked to act and do things. And if you look at the pattern of how they do this, it's a little bit of activity and they control it. And then they go, oh, I'm done with that. And then they try it again. And they go, I'm done with that. And they try it again. And I'm done with that. And so the, the key thing about stress is if you give your children opportunities for moderate, predictable challenges, you will get the level of stress activation that leads to strength and resilience in the stress response systems. And those things involve stuff like, you know what, piano recital and, you know, being part of a sports team. And there's a different level of stress in practice versus a game. And there's a different level of stress when you have to memorize eight lines of poetry to recite for your, your class. And so when we stress our children in academic and in motor and in social activities, we're building the neurobiological capabilities to be more social, to be stronger, to be smarter. And if we coddle them, if we don't challenge them, if they do not have these challenges, their rate of growth is stunted. And I think that this is something that, again, I'm sure you guys have talked about this and run into this in your 30 years, you have well-intended parents that want the very best for their kids, but they over protect them. They, they, they're worried that they're going to fall off the monkey bars and, oh God, don't climb a tree and all kinds of other stuff. Don't ride your bike to school because you might get kidnapped. And I'm like, it's like ridiculous. I mean, we really need to reexamine our relationship as parents with the concept of risk and the concept of stress, because both of those in the right doses are really, really good for you. Now that's stress. The other thing, distress is, is essentially when you reach a level of stretching some system to the point where it is going to cause a feeling of discomfort. So if you let your bladder feel and don't let somebody go to the bathroom, you can feel urinary tract distress. And it's not, it's different than urinary tract stress, right? Stress is like, oh, I have to go to the bathroom. So I'm going to go. Distress is, oh, I have to go to the bathroom, but I'm sitting in a lecture and I don't want to be, get up in front of 150 people and walk out in the middle of it. And so you just are like, oh my God, you could no longer concentrate on what's being said and you're like, oh, please break, time, break, time, break, time, break. So that's, that's an example of distress, but you weren't traumatized, right? What would be traumatic would be if the, it kept going and you, like particularly your adolescent, right? You get up and all of a sudden you can't hold it and you wet yourself in front of everybody. That would result in what could conceivably turn into a little bit of a traumatic event, right? Yes. And a humiliating experience. So they're kind of on the same continuum, but the pattern of, of how stress is, is essentially applied to the, to the person makes a big difference in, in whether it's resilience building, whether it's kind of what we call you stress, normal, not really, not, not a lot of valence or distress, which can ultimately be connected also to trauma. This is so good. And I was going to say, as you were talking about the stress portion, so we have a book coming out that you're a part of the series, it's called capable. And I was thinking we needed to make the announcement that we haven't paid you to say the things that we feel so strongly about and are trying to help parents know too. So it's fun to be on the same page on all of these issues. So, you know, I think if you are an open-minded person and you observe human behavior, you kind of come to these conclusions, right? Yes. And whether it's in the language of neurobiology or the language of let's talk about, you know, better coaching practices, let's talk about better teaching practices. It's, it's amazing how often there's a convergence of observation, right? Absolutely. And it's, it's important stuff. Yes. And I, you know, the thing's a little, of course, you've, you guys have been practicing for a while, long time. So, and you've seen the ebbs and flows of kind of popular parenting practices. And it's, it's interesting how things, how that happens, you know, I just, I, you know, exclaims in the book. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, that's good. I can't wait to read the book. This sounds awesome. We would love to send you one. It is a big issue. Yes. Yes. It's, and I feel bad for young parents because they kind of get yo-yo'd, especially with the internet now, they, they get yo-yo'd like, should I do this, should I do that? And it can be very confusing. Yes. Well, one of the places I think parents are turning to the internet and anybody who can help most these days is about regulation. And you do a beautiful job of explaining the importance of prioritizing regulation with kids. Will you talk about how a regulated adult can bring a dysregulated child back to safety and what that looks like in everyday parenting moments? Yeah. It's interesting because everybody has observed what I'm going to talk about. Not a lot of people though have been really taken a deeper dive into the mechanism. But one of the things that we all know is that human emotions are contagious. And this is part of this neurobiological set of gifts that our species has. We're a very social species. Huge portions of our physiology are dedicated to forming and maintaining relationships with others. And again, I could go into ad nauseam, but it's even the way that our sensory apparatus on our skin, the fact that our face has all of these incredible capabilities to be expressive. These are all about communication and connection. And so human beings are, and this is sort of a foreign concept to a lot of people who were raised in Western philosophy, but human beings are interdependent upon other human beings. We are not independent sort of in a vacuum physiological creatures. We are neurobiologically influenced by the people around us and touch, sight, smell, all of that stuff influences our own physiology. And a huge part of successful human groups, the reason human families or clans have survived is because we're so good at creating this interpersonal glue, this relational glue, so that we can work as teams. We can work as a unit rather than as an individual. And central to that is the neurobiology of reading and responding to other people, which is mostly nonverbal. And there's a couple of different key aspects to it. One of them is sort of physical proximity, right? It's, there's a, you're much more likely to be able to tune into somebody if you are physically close enough to be kind of face to face, where you can sort of read those subtle cues and so forth. And you can communicate in very powerful ways with people you know, with the tiniest little subtle, like millimeter change in your eyebrow, right? And how often have you guys been at, at like an event as you know, you get somebody's house and somebody will say something, you just look at somebody for like, I look at your partner for a second and you go, oh, man, I can't wait to talk about this after we leave. But that, that capacity, that sensitivity to the relational environment is so important for parenting. And a part of that is that part of this neurobiology in our brain is this continual, if you will, seeking and reaffirming that you belong. You know, am I one of us? Do I belong? Am I, do you see me? And so that's continually going on, even in your own clan with people that you know and love and everything else. And so this is why we're very sensitive to disapproval from a parent, right? Or a teacher or a friend or somebody we get a sense that we're not breaking a signal that we're not special, we're not seeing, we're sort of outside or we did something that upset somebody. And this neurobiological sensitivity is, there's a couple different things that are important about it if you're a parent. One is it, there's a, there's a phenomenon that we talk about as the power differential. So that in general, when you're in a group, and this is particularly true with children in a home, the, the dominant tone, dominant emotional tone of the group is set by the leader of the group. And that in usually in the home, that's the parent most typically. And so if the parent is feeling upset, preoccupied, disrespected at work, frustrated at work, and they come home, that is, that will have a spillover impact on the children. And if the parent, on the other hand, feels calm and regulated, they themselves are not hungry, they're not thirsty, they're not cold, they're not preoccupied with work, they're not distracted by their phone, they can come home and be present. And they are intentional about, all right, this is what we're going to do for dinner. And this is how what we're going to do for the evening. And I'm, I'm going to help you get organized with your homework. And, and there's a sense of confidence and calm because you're regulated, that literally calms the entire family. And it's, and again, I, every, I've, I talk about it like that actually happens a lot. You know, I mean, I know that most people come home from work, kids come home from work exhausted, on a dysregulated, they've been struggling all day to hold it together and be socially appropriate, not getting trouble. And they come home and they kind of unravel. And the parents are coming home from work and they know they got to make, they got 45 minutes and then they got to get Billy to soccer practice and blah, blah, blah, so that's like, there's just, it's, it's the mess time. And I, you know, we could have, we could have lots of conversations about the value of after school activities. And, you know, when it, when it gets too disruptive to family life and when it's actually in addition to family life, we're struggling with as a society, I think. Yes. Anyway, but that, that the, I always recommend that parents, before they walk in, take at least 10 minutes for themselves, take 10 minutes, you know, do whatever, you know, check your messages before you walk in the door, you know, sit in the car for a little while, listen to music or go work out or what it just, it is not selfish to do things that will help you be regulated in your home. It's actually important that you do that because once you start to sacrifice all of those personal regulating things, your ability to be present and calm and invested in your family diminishes and diminishes and diminishes. And, you know, at the same time that you are bombarded all day long on social media, in commercials, on TV shows, with this incredibly artificial representation of how together every other parent is, that they can take a huge, you know, I got fired, but really let me help you with your homework, you know. Really bad stuff can happen and it gets solved in 22 minutes by leave it to Beavers, that, what's his name, Ward. Ward was great that way. But this, we all carry around the residue of these, these unrealistic scenarios. And I think that, you know, social media beats us up, that we should be doing it this way and this is the kind of food we serve our kids and, you know, if you don't get your kid playing, you know, if you want him to get into college and play lacrosse, he's got to hit the ball a thousand times every day. You're like, God, what are we going to do that? You will always be made to feel like you're not enough and the reality is you are enough, but you've got to give yourself a chance to fill up your own gas tank and if you do, all that other stuff is easier to do. With Mother's Day coming up, we have both been thinking a lot about our moms. We both lost them in recent years and there are days we miss their voices more than we know how to say. 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Their signature organic cotton sheets are breathable, incredibly soft and they actually get softer over time. The first night you climb in, you notice it immediately. I added the waffle blanket too and now the whole bed feels finished, like polished, like intentional. Sharon literally texted me from her house a week later and said, I ordered them, I couldn't go back. That's what happens. You start with the sheets and suddenly you're upgrading the whole bed. Upgrade your sleep with bowling branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at BowlandBranch.com slash raising with code raising. That's Bowl and Branch B-O-L-L-A-N-D branch.com slash raising code raising to unlock 15% off. Exclusions apply. Well, let's go one step further in talking about regulations. You talk about the power of rhythm, movement, music, pattern activities for regulations. What would you say are some accessible ways that families can use rhythm at home to support regulation and connection? You've read about this and one of the things that we try to help people learn about in terms of neuroscience is that your brain is organized in a way such that there's sort of a bottom and a top. The top part is where we do all of our most abstract thinking, speech and language and good ideas, bad ideas, cognition. When the top part of our brain is fully engaged, we can be very thoughtful and reflective and creative and all of our morals and all of what we think is right, correct. This is our values, our inner cortex. The way you want to parent is up here. The dilemma is, let's go back to stress. Pretend the brain is this upside down triangle. The very top is that cortical part where all the good things are happening. When you get stressed, parts of the cortex start to get less efficient. We were just talking about coming home from work. You've been stressing and stressing and stressing and stressing and stressing and you literally run out of energy. There's many studies that show this that your ability to maintain executive functioning fades over the day. In the morning, you wake up, you're going to exercise, and I'm going to stay on my diet. By seven o'clock at night, those Oreos look really good. Your ability to use executive functioning to your cognitive part of your brain to inhibit that is diminished. That's part of the dilemma with state-dependent function that we refer to it as. What we know is that when you are trying to get access to that top part of your brain, you have to be regulated, which means you can't be hungry, you can't be thirsty, you can't have a full bladder, it being sick, being sleep deprived, being overstimulated by too many screens, having too much sensory chaos, all of those things sort of pull energy out of your stress response system and shut down the top part of your brain. When you want to sit and reflect and talk with your child about school or their values or anything, they also need to have their cortex open. They need to be able to hear what you're saying. They need to be able to stay in that state and reflect on what you're saying. But if they're hungry, thirsty, cold, overwhelmed, shamed, they're upset because how badly they performed in the sporting event and then you want to talk to them about what I think you need to do next time, maybe you should cut to the left and go right. That will make them get worse and blow up as opposed to calm down. One of the things that we know can help people regulate is, first of all, and again, Ivory Perrin knows this, they have to eat. You have to not be hungry. If you're not thirsty and you're not hungry, you're taking really positive steps forward in getting regulated. The second thing is, it's very important for parents to remember how non-regulating it is to have somebody in your face asking you things. It's much better to be parallel. They want you present, but just be parallel and patient and give them control process of bringing stuff up. Then the rhythmic stuff that can really help that is to start with just driving in the car's rhythmic. How many of you noticed when you're a kid who will not sit across the kitchen table and talk to you in the car? Well, jabber, jabber, jabber, they're with you. They're in parallel. They have control over what they say. They feel more regulated. I'm not saying just take your kids up for a drive, but if you go for a walk with your kid, if you play catch with them, catch is a great way to do it. If you play a board game, if you play cards, if you... There's a lot of ways to do things that are motor rhythmic. There are things that are also auditory rhythmic. Music is very helpful. There are things that are small motor rhythmic. There are people that have learned how to sit next to their grandparent and knit, or they do art, or they do something else, doodling. There are many ways to do it, but it's really helpful to remember as a parent, and I keep telling teachers this all the time, fortunately we have some teachers that understand this. The human brain essentially the cognitive parts of our brain, speech and language and thinking, all of them emerged from the precursor of motor development. So movement is actually incredibly helpful when it comes to opening the cortex to learn new things or to retrieve things that are already up there. So when you walk, when you ride a bike, when you swim, when those things are really helpful for bringing rhythm into an interaction with somebody that you are trying to connect with and communicate with. Then the last thing, and I know that this is hard for parents, is being quiet is really important. A lot of us are very uncomfortable with quiet, and it's powerful. One of the things that you can do is actually just be quiet and do the things that you do in normal everyday preparation of a meal or washing the dishes, or grooming the dog. And doing those things in the presence of a child who feels dysregulated will help them regulate. And the older a child gets, the more, I don't want to say savvy they get, but the more they know if you're trying to use regulatory tricks on them. So it always works to do regulatory things that are actually the bread and butter of what you would do anyway, right? Whether it's raking, shoveling, gardening, to say, hey, come come on, or doing a pleasurable thing like play, some kind of regulatory play. Let's play catch. Let's play ping pong. Let's play air hockey. Let's do something together, this motor. And I always like to pick something that I will lose at because it helps shift the power differential. And when you're at the top of the power differential, the people at the bottom are like this, but when you're at the top, you're like this. And so let them trash you at ping pong. They probably can do it anyway. Find something they're good at, or they can feel like mastery, and dominance because they've gone all day long and people have mastered and dominated them in somewhere or another and give them back a little bit of control, a little bit of power. We could spend three hours talking with you. This is so helpful and rich. Yes, that's exactly theoretically, practically, and so many different aspects, but we do want to be respectful of your time. So last question is where can folks find you and follow along with all the amazing things that you're doing? I am a very fortunate person that I have a wonderful team and we're part of a community of clinicians and teachers and other folks. And there are lots of places where you can learn more about our work. One good starting place is probably the website, NeuroSsequential.com is one of the websites we have. And then we have a few social media things. I'm not very good at that, in fact, so funny because I'll, you know, I'll, someone will say, I sent you a message on like a year and a half ago. I'm like, really? I'm sorry. I don't know. Where does that go? I don't know. What's a DM? They're like, okay. So there are some things at places you can find us. I think if you just Google my name, you can find a lot of, a lot of kind of video clips of things that we've put together are available on, in YouTube. And I have, we actually have a YouTube channel and I, they're going to kill me, but I can't even remember how you get there. Well, we can find out and link to it in our show notes, certainly. Yeah. Yes. That's a great idea. Okay. We'll do that. We'll link to all of it in the show notes. You know what they do? I'm so bad. I, when I go travel and stuff, they have to pin an envelope on my shirt like a kid in a field trip. If you find Dr. Perry, send him to Chicago. He's supposed to be there. Like 11 AM on Wednesday. So good. Dr. Perry, thank you. Yes. It is a gift to spend this time with you. Yes. Thank you for your time and for your work. We are all benefiting from it. Indeed. David, what a team we have that we get to call friends who help make this podcast possible. Chris Sterrett, our engineer, our management team at KCH. And we are thrilled to be a part of the That Sounds Fun Network. Our music was created by the insanely talented Dave Haywood of Lady A. And if this podcast felt helpful to you, please consider subscribing, liking, sharing all the things. We are grateful for you and cheering you on always. happened with Southeastern Group Save. Save one-third on the price of train tickets when you travel at off-peak times in groups of three to nine adults. 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