What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

This chapter discusses relational poverty in the modern world and its impact on the human experience.

Perry recounts his time with the Māori community, and his attempt to learn about trauma and healing through the lens of the community. He describes how the community has no conceptual separation of problems into categories. There is a wholeness to their thinking and being. All problems are interconnected, and they see the Western approach as chasing symptoms rather than healing people. Pain, distress, and dysfunction all arise from fragmentation, disconnection, and desynchrony. A core element to the Māori approach to healing is the concept of whanaungatanga, which refers to reciprocal relationships, kinship, and family connection, and the importance of these in the process of healing.

Upon returning from his time with Māori, Perry applied this approach to a patient, a 10-year-old boy named Timothy. Timothy had been diagnosed with ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and medications had not been helping his symptoms. His history showed that he had been physically abused from the ages of three to six by his mother’s live-in partner. After his mother finally left the man, Timothy and his mother found themselves impoverished. They moved cities a lot in those years, finally settling in Texas.