The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook -- What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing

Written by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz

Narrated by Chris Kipiniak

In this classic work of developmental psychology, renowned psychiatrist and the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller What Happened to You? reveals how trauma affects children—and outlines the path to recovery

How does trauma affect a child's mind—and how can that mind recover?

Child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce D. Perry has helped children faced with unimaginable horror: genocide survivors, murder witnesses, kidnapped teenagers, and victims of family violence. In the classic The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr. Perry tells their stories of trauma and transformation and shares their lessons of courage, humanity, and hope. Deftly combining unforgettable case histories with his own compassionate, insightful strategies for rehabilitation, Perry explains what happens to children’s brains when they are exposed to extreme stress—and reveals the unexpected measures that can be taken to ease such pain and help them grow into healthy adults. Only when we understand the science of the mind and the power of love and nurturing can we hope to heal the spirit of even the most wounded child.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Sep 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781549116674

Bruce D. Perry

Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., is the senior fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy (www.ChildTrauma.org), a not-for-profit organization based in Houston that is dedicated to improving the lives of high-risk children, and he is an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago. He is the author, with Maia Szalavitz, of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, a bestselling book based on his work with maltreated children.

Reviews for The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog

[Tere · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading the book's title, you think you know what you're going to find, but not at all... the stories are brutal, and the good thing is that in the end, almost all of them have a positive outcome.

Bruce Perry shares his experience since he started being a child psychiatrist: his way of working, his reasoning in each case, his conclusions, his blunders... and although in some cases I think he gets a bit boring by giving too many explanations, he does it in a quite engaging manner.

And of course, he also talks about the brain; it’s impressive what this organ does to protect itself, especially in the early years of life.

"The impact of early experiences will necessarily be greater than that of more delayed ones. The brain tries to make sense of the world by searching for patterns. When it links consistent and coherent patterns, it labels them as normal or predictable and stops paying conscious attention." (Translated from Spanish)