Michael was impeccably dressed in a tiny tie and suit coat, standing on a busy street corner in Sofia, Bulgaria looking for his parents. At three, he was realizing, along with some passers-by, that he had been abandoned. He would never see his parents again.
He was referred to me ten years later following treatment in a partial hospital program to treat, among other things, disrespect, running away, and drug use. His adoptive mother told the story about how he was found by the police on that street corner a decade earlier. I asked him what he remembered about that day and he laughed a little, as if in disbelief, and said, “I don’t remember any of it.”
Although he doesn’t remember the details of that day, a very primal pain and fear had been etched into his nervous system. It is the nervous system’s job to protect us and it does so by taking past events, applying them to the present, to predict the future. Michael’s nervous system learned a very important lesson early in his life – trusting others was dangerous. The closer you are, the more dangerous it can be. As he began to feel closer to his adoptive parents, his nervous system acted quickly, pushing him to fight or flee.
We often think that if we can’t remember something, it doesn’t impact our behavior. But when our relationship with our caregivers is disrupted, whether at birth or, like Michael, later in childhood, our nervous system is always placed on high alert, often impacting those relationships that, ironically, offer the greatest potential for healing.
Our work, then, is not to try to fix the behavior, but to quiet the nervous system. L.R. Knost wrote, “when little people are overwhelmed by big emotions, it’s our job to share our calm, not join their chaos.” In doing so, we can rewire Michael’s nervous system, one repetition at a time. There is no place better to do this than in our schools because no one, outside of the home, has children for 30 hours a week for forty weeks. But we need to remember that our work is not to fix, but to calm. Or, to borrow from a common saying, “don’t just do something, stand there!”
