10 NSRF® Connections • 2016-17, Issue 3 NSRF® Connections • 2016-17, Issue 3 11
The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog
and Other Stories from a Child Psy-
chiatrist’s Notebook: What Trauma-
tized Children Can Teach Us About
Loss, Love, and Healing
by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz,
Basic Books, 2006
Why a review of a child psychia-
trist’s book for Connections, a jour-
nal for educators? Because the ten
case studies which Dr. Bruce Perry
has chosen to share--although dis-
turbing, some might even say, bizarre-
-just may be encountered in your
school. I suggest that his approach
to healing these young people offers
valuable insights for all of us to heed,
particularly when, as he notes, our
child welfare system, social workers,
and foster parents are typically over-
worked and under-trained.
The lead author is an American
psychiatrist, currently the Senior
Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy
in Houston, Texas and an adjunct
professor of psychiatry and behav-
ioral sciences at the Feinberg School
of Medicine in Chicago. Previously
he was chief of psychiatry at Texas
Children’s Hospital, and vice-chair-
man for research in the department
of psychiatry at the Baylor College
of Medicine, in Houston, Texas. In a
brief “Author’s Note” with which he
begins this book, Dr. Perry informs
readers:
“The sad reality is that these sto-
ries are but a tiny percentage of the
many we could have told. Over the
last ten years our clinical group at the
ChildTrauma Academy has treated
more than a hundred children who
have witnessed the murder of a par-
ent. We have worked with hundreds
of children who endured severe early
neglect in institutions or at the hands
of their parents or guardians.”
In the Introduction to The Boy
Who Was Raised As A Dog, Dr.
Perry first notes the overall situation
facing children and young people who
have experienced horrendous abuse.
For example, PTSD (Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder) was diagnosed and
introduced only recently into psy-
chiatry in 1980. Today it is believed
to affect at least 7% of all Americans
with an impact that is far greater in
children than in adults. While not all
children fortunately will ever experi-
ence any of these events, approxi-
mately 40% of American children will
experience at least one traumatizing
event by the age of 18, including the
death of a sibling or parent, ongoing
physical abuse and/or neglect, sexual
abuse, a serious accident, natural
disaster, domestic violence, or other
violent crime. Dr. Perry ends his
Introduction noting –
“The core lessons these chil-
dren have taught me are relevant
for us all…. In order to appreciate
how children heal we need to under-
stand how they learn to love, how
they cope with challenge, how stress
affects them. And by recognizing the
destructive impact that violence and
threat can have on the capacity to
love and work, we can come to better
understand ourselves and to nurture
the people in our lives, especially the
children.”
Here is a brief overview of a
sample of 5 of the 10 case studies
described in detail in this book. What
I found particularly useful are Dr. Per-
ry’s discussions of his own thinking,
his reasoning and unique approaches
to healing these individual young
people, beginning with deep listening,
and often with the littlest children,
simply getting down on the floor and
quietly coloring. (1) Tina – Dr. Perry
changes the names of each of these
children – was sexually abused from
the age of 4 to age 6 by the 16-year-
old brother of her babysitter. (2)
Leon, was 16 and in a maximum-
Book review by Dave Lehman
The Boy who was Raised as a Dog
security prison for having sadistically
murdered two teenage girls, and then
raped their dead bodies. He was
diagnosed a “classic sociopath” with
ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disor-
der), with Autism, and suffered from
early childhood parental neglect.
Here Dr. Perry was called upon to
determine Leon’s mental capacity to
know what he had done in order to
determine an appropriate sentence.
(3) Three-year-old Sandy was being
called by an attorney from the Public
Guardian’s office in Cook County, Illi-
nois to testify about the murder of her
mother. This case led Dr. Perry into
a deeper understanding of the effects
of trauma on the brain, particularly
“sensitization,” “tolerance,” and “dis-
sociation.” (4) A fourth case involved
21 children, specifically those who
were released and survived the Waco,
Texas Branch Davidian compound and
their cult leader David Koresh. Read-
ers may recall this tragic situation in
February of 1993 involving the FBI
and BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobac-
co and Firearms) and firearms viola-
tions. This experience led Dr. Perry
to form one of his major conclusions
about healing traumatized children:
“Relationships matter: the cur-
rency for systemic change was trust,
and trust comes through forming
healthy working relationships…. The
seeds of a new way of working with
traumatized children were sown in
the ashes of Waco.”
For those of us who are teach-
ers and/or administrators working in
schools, whether public or private, al-
ternative, charter, STEM, or whatev-
er, relationships are indeed key, and
creating the conditions in which every
child, every student, has at least one
meaningful relationship with a caring
adult is absolutely essential. As Dr.
Perry puts it – “People, not programs,
change people.” (5) The fifth case
is about Jason, who is 7 yet socially
still a toddler. Dr. Perry presents this
case to illustrate the importance of
peers in the healing process, stat-
ing, “while we realized that ongoing
relationships are critical to healing,
we hadn’t yet fully understood how
important peer relationships, are,
especially as children get older.”
In his closing chapter, “Healing
Communities,” Dr. Perry notes the
dramatic changes that have occurred
in the caring for our children, par-
ticularly in this country. For example,
countless generations of humans
initially lived in small groups of 40
to 150 people, most of whom were
closely related to each other and lived
in community. As late as the 1500s
the average European family con-
sisted of about 20 people whose lives
were intimately connected on a daily
basis. By the mid-18th century this
number was 10 living in close proxim-
ity, and by 1960 the number in this
country was 5! By 2000, the aver-
age size of a household was less than
4, and 26% of Americans live alone.
Other changes he notes include – in
1905 only 1% suffered depression, by
1955 it increased to 6%, and in 1955
teen depressions have increased by
a factor of 10! Dr. Perry states, “The
disconnect between what we need
in order to be mentally healthy and
what the modern world offers can
also be seen in the constant unease
felt by parents – about the internet,
the media, drugs, violent predators,
pedophiles, economic inequality, and
above all, the values of our culture
that shape our responses to these
issues.”
I’ll close this brief review, by first
urging all of you readers who work in
schools to read this book, and sec-
ondly, quoting this summary from Dr.
Perry in the closing chapter –
“…. my experience as well a the
research suggests that the most
important healing experiences in
the lives of traumatized children do
not occur in therapy itself. Trauma
and our responses to it cannot be
understood outside the context of
human relationships. Whether people
survived an earthquake or have been
repeatedly sexually abused, what
matters most is how those experi-
ences affect their relationships – to
their loved ones, to themselves, and
to the world. The most traumatic
aspects of all disasters involve the
shattering of human connections.
This is especially true for chil-
dren. Being harmed by the people
who are supposed to love you, being
abandoned by them, being robbed
of the one-to-one relationships that
allow you to feel safe and valued to
become humane – these are profound-
ly destructive experiences. Because
humans are inescapably social beings,
the worst catastrophes that can befall
us inevitably involve relational loss.
“As a result, recovery from trau-
ma and neglect is also all about rela-
tionships – rebuilding trust, regaining
confidence, returning to a sense of
security and reconnecting to love. Of
course, medications can help relieve
symptoms and talking to a therapist
can be incredibly useful. But healing
and recovery are impossible – even
with the best medications and ther-
apy in the world – without lasting,
caring connections to other.”
That’s a message which all educa-
tors and all parent/caregivers I think
need to hear in this day and age of an
over emphasis on academic learning,
the common core, and the loss of time
for our children and youth to play, to
be creative, to simply sit quietly, to
turn off the TV, put away the “smart”
phones, and to even dare to touch
each other, to give hugs, and simply
listen!
Editor’s note: In this and future issues of Connections, links to Amazon are replaced with links to Smile.Amazon.com,
which donates a portion of your purchases to a non-profit organization you select. If you have not already set up your
Amazon Smile account and would like to support the NSRF, please select Harmony School Corporation, the parent compa-
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LInKs
Purchase The Boy who was
Raised as a Dog, available in
hardback, paperback, Kindle,
Audible, and audiobook CD for-
mats: Via Amazon Smile
Dave Lehman is the former
founding princ ipal/teacher
of the Lehman Alternative
Comunity School in Ithaca,
NY. This public middle-high
school was named for Dave
and his wife Judy by the Ithaca, New York
Board of Education upon their retirement
after 30 years. Dave was a member
of the very first “Principals Seminar”
leadership group at the beginning of
the NSRF, under the umbrella for the
Annenberg Institute for School Reform
at Brown University. Soon thereafter
he was trained as a CFG coach and
then an NSRF National Facilitator.
His email is davelehman@mac.com
“People, not programs,
change people.”
