Susan Britton MCC explains how childhood trauma shapes unconscious brain wiring that controls adult habits like delegating and asking for help. She uses Bruce Perry's case study of a boy named Jesse, whose physiological responses to abusive caregivers shifted with age, to show how the brain defaults to familiar survival strategies when triggered. Through neuroplasticity, we can rewire these patterns by practicing new habits and reframing help-seeking as collaborative strength.
Chapters
If you are growing as a leader, a manager, a coach, a human being, there are new behaviors that you will want to bring online and master so that you can be successful in the role that you are working in or living in. And yet, if you're like most people, those new behaviors may not be easy for you to master. You might find that you're uncomfortable, that you hesitate, that you sort of resist doing new things. For myself, I recognize that I am not great at delegating. I'm not great at asking for help. I'm not great at remembering to collaborate immediately. So those are new behaviors that I want to be able to bring online so that I can be more successful and be of greater impact in the work that I do. So there's a very interesting biological, physiological reason that it can be hard for us to bring new behaviors online, and it has to do with how our brains wired from the time we were children. So I'm reading a book now called What Happened to You? and it's co-authored by Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry. And Perry is a respected psychiatrist and researcher around childhood trauma and what it does to their brain development. And he cites a very fascinating story within the book. It's fascinating but also quite tragic, and it has to do with a little boy named Jesse. And Jesse, as a toddler, was abused by his biological father. And so of course he was removed from that home and then put into foster father— foster parent situations. And his foster parent situations were also as egregious as his biological situation. One time he landed in the hospital with a coma at the age of 13. And so Perry, recognizing that the brain development of a toddler when he is is in some sort of a fight-flight stress response is going to have a very different response than a 13-year-old would be. And what Perry discovered was that when Jesse, while he's still in a coma, smelled the unwashed clothing of his biological father, his heart rate actually plummeted to about 60 beats per minute, which is quite unusual. Most people think, if I'm in a fight-flight state, my heart rate would increase and skyrocket. And the reason that Jesse's heart rate plummeted to 60 beats per minute smelling the biological father's clothing is that he reverted to what he knew to do to feel as safe as possible as a toddler. Toddlers can't run away. They can't fight. They can't flight. They have to disassociate and withdraw. Take that about 10 years forward. He's now 13, and Jesse is strong enough to fight against his foster father. And in this case, that's what landed him in the hospital in a coma. When he smelled the unwashed clothing of the foster father, now his biological reactions were quite different. His heart rate skyrocketed to 160 beats per minute now, and his respiration increased. So Perry is analyzing all of this, and as the advocate for Jesse, is able to point out that based on these cues that we may not even be aware of, the cues of the scent, the smell of unwashed clothing that reminds us of certain experiences that were very threat and trauma-oriented cause the brain to revert to some sort of behavior that is most comfortable or feels the safest for us. So looping back around to my, my opening comment about I'm not great at delegating, I'm not great at asking for help, that has a lot to do with the fact that when I was a child I was not only modeled to not ask for help but to pull myself up by my bootstraps and my lovely agrarian economy sort of family family culture, and instead do it yourself, don't ask for help. So I was not only modeled that, I was rewarded for not asking for help and doing it on my own, and so now when I need to do that as a leader, it's not as comfortable for me. I would imagine every one of us can think about something that may not be comfortable, and we may not be aware, fully aware, that some of those unconscious cues, the way that our brain was wired from long, long ago, is really sort of working against us thinking that this is what I'm used to. I want to keep doing this because I know that I was safe back then when I did this. Unfortunately, fast forward several decades, we're no longer safe using those same behaviors. So it's interesting food for thought thinking about how your brain is wired. The great news—neuroplasticity to the rescue—we can start to become more aware of those older behaviors, think about what frame we want to put around asking for help today, such as, wow, this is cool, I get to play with other people, I get to collaborate I get to collaborate with other people, get to be smarter together. It's not just me having to pull myself up by my bootstraps. So whatever it is that you're working with and wanting to bring online, cooperate with your brain. Let it encourage you. Think about what new neural networks you want to be able to bring online to be able to move forward and be safe in new ways.
