Bruce Buffer Quotes

Your connectedness to other people is so key to buffering any current stressor—and to healing from past trauma. Being with people who are present, supportive, and nurturing. Belonging.

The concept of resilience is used in our field. But if you look carefully at the biology after a traumatic experience-all the way down to the way genes are expressed-trauma will change everyone in some way. And those changes will be there even if they don’t result in any apparent ‘real life’ problems for the person, even if the person demonstrates resilience. A child may continue to do just as well in school, for example, but it takes much more energy and effort. Or we may find that a child is able to return to his previous level of emotional functioning, but changes in his neuroendocrine system may make him more likely to develop diabetes. This is, in essence, what the ACE studies have demonstrated. Adversity impacts the developing child. Period. What that impact will be, when it may manifest, how it maybe ‘buffered’-we can’t always say. But developmental trauma will always influence our body and brain.

This relational poverty means less buffering capacity when we do experience stress. We are becoming more “sensitized” to anything that feels potentially threatening, such as a person with a different political opinion. Many people are overly reactive to relatively minor challenges. And when we’re overly sensitive as a result of state-dependent functioning, we quickly shift to a less rational, more emotional style of thinking and acting. We’re losing the ability to calmly consider someone else’s opinion, reflect, and attempt to see things from their point of view.

In some cases the intelligence community could subsidize commercial and academic sources to ensure specialized or additional expertise for surge situations. The key challenge in these cases is that, although experts in academia and the media are likely to be eager to assist the government, they may be reluctant to have direct association with intelligence organizations. U.S. intelligence will need mechanisms that keep these experts at arm's length. One alternative could be to work through agencies such at the State Department and National Security Council, or private organizations such as the National Science Foundation. Moreover, these buffer mechanisms will need to be real, and not just a cover story. A few stories about how such-and-such organization is a 'front for U.S. intelligence' will ensure not only that the organization will lose its access to experts, but that the experts themselves will be less likely to offer their services to the government in the future.

If, in the first two months of life, a child experienced high adversity with minimal relational buffering but was then put into a healthier environment for the next twelve years, their outcomes were worse than the outcomes of children who had low adversity and healthy relational connection in the first two months but then spent the next twelve years with high adversity. Think of that: The child who has only two months of really bad experiences does worse than the child with almost twelve years of bad experiences, all because of the timing of the experiences

Adversity impacts the developing child. Period. What the impact will be, when it may manifest, how it may be “buffered”-we can’t always say. But developmental trauma will always influence our body and brain.

There is a direct relationship between a person’s degree of social isolation and their risk for physical and mental health problems. But when you do have connectedness…you have built-in buffers for whatever stress or distress you experience.

And just as with trauma, several essential questions can help us assess whether a situation is neglectful, and if so, how great the impact will be. When during development did the neglect take place? What was the pattern? How severe or depriving was the neglect? How long did it last? And, since absolute neglect is rare, what ‘buffering’ factors were present when the neglect occurred?