The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog

As one family therapist famously put it, we tend to prefer the “certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.”

During dissociation, the brain prepares the body for injury. Blood is shunted away from the limbs and the heart rate slows to reduce blood loss from wounds. A flood of endogenous opioids—the brain’s natural heroin-like substances—is released, killing pain, producing calm and a sense of psychological distance from what is happening.

Dissociation is a very primitive reaction: the earliest life forms (and the youngest members of higher species) can rarely escape dire situations under their own steam. Their only possible response to being attacked or hurt, then, is essentially to curl up, to make themselves as small as possible, to cry for help and hope for a miracle.

It made sense: a person with an overactive stress system would pay close attention to the faces of people like teachers and classmates, where threat might lurk, but not to benign things like classroom lessons.

Because humans are inescapably social beings, the worst catastrophes that can befall us inevitably involve relational loss

Did you know that the human brain has special neural systems that are designed to read and respond to the social cues from other people?

some studies have found that depression can be exacerbated by ruminating on past negative events

In one study we conducted in the mid-1990s, we found that children with supportive families who were assigned to therapy to discuss trauma were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder than those whose parents were told to bring them in only if they observed specific symptoms

The price of love is the agony of loss, from infancy onward

Just holding a loved one’s hand is powerful stress-reducing medicine