This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody one way for me to judge the power of any interview I've done for this show

is how voluminous are my notes afterwards. Using that yardstick this was a very

powerful interview.

Let me start here by giving credit to my wife Bianco, who is my co-interviewer for this episode.

She is the one who suggested we recruit Dr. Bruce Perry as a guest after she read a book that Bruce co-authored with

Oprah Winfrey. It's called What Happened to you and it is about in part the

radical shift in perspective that can come when we change our question about other

people and about ourselves from what's wrong with you to what happened to you.

We're talking here about trauma of course, but not just big tea trauma, a concept that may not apply to everyone,

but also small tea trauma, what my friend Dr Mark Epstein calls the trauma of everyday life, the trauma that comes from living

in a world characterized by impermanence and entropy. That, that small T trauma is universal. And Dr. Perry, who's the principal of the Neurosequential Network and a professor in the

Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine

at Northwestern University has some incredibly

interesting thoughts about how to heal.

What I found interesting is that healing, which can sound like a grandiose and maybe out of reach

concept, is, per Dr. Perry, a much more down-to-earth process.

Part of his prescription is to focus on small moments, what some researchers call

micro-interactions. He also talks about the value of moderate challenges

including travel, which I found interesting, and how to get better at making up after the inevitable arguments

we're going to have with people, which psychologists call rupture and repair.

We also talk about the concept of safety, which can be controversial and sound to some like

PC nonsense but from a neurobiological standpoint it makes a lot of sense and it made me reflect

...