Early trauma to young males can be reversed by nurturing and by supplying the missed developmental experiences.
Nature opens and develops capacities on schedule regardless of the current stage is complete or not. Males being more vulnerable means that gaps in development occur more often resulting in mal adapted behavior. Experience shows that going back and providing the missed nurturing and missed developmental stimulus will fill in the gaps resulting in a fully developed psyche. Remediation however is never as good or complete as providing the nurturing-experience in its age and stage appropriate sequence.

The procedures that have been used with adolescent males that seem to work pretty well, these procedures follow pretty well more or less the format of Waldorf education for children in which these tough young males are read to, they’re told stories, they’re caught up in the stories and encouraged to act the stories out, the end up by in large literate from this one activity of being read stories and acting stories out.  They begin to really learn to play for the first time in their life.  They’ve never been played with or learned to play and play is largely metaphoric symbolic in its structure.  When you’re acting out a story on stage you’re taking on a role and acting out a story, you’re really dealing with high level symbolism and metaphor and things like that which are the creative parts of the brain and they’re being acted out with the body and the whole emotional system involved in it.  So all three brains are intimately connected in that,

And we find that taking them simply back through these stages of childhood. It’s not all the way back to infancy. That’s pretty hard to do but at least going back into that earlier period of childhood when the child loves storytelling, play acting and just play in general so very deeply because it fills developmental needs and taking these young people and putting them into that situation has had marvelous results, therapeutic results, transformative results, patching them back up.

Marian Diamond, PhD, one of our great Neural Scientists, points out the brain’s highly flexible, plastic. It can be changed, transformed and can actually grow new material right up until the last moment of life provided it’s challenged. But you have to know how to challenge the brain in that respect but any brain is transformative or it can be repaired.  Now to what extent, you don’t know, but at least probably to the extent that an individual can function socially very well and be far, far happier as a person.

Now, to bring that about probably requires nurturing and nurturing is the last thing they get in prison. They can’t nurture each other any more than two infants can model for each other or nurture for each other.  It doesn’t work that way.  So prisons are diametrically opposed to the very thing they’re supposed to be doing which is rehabilitation.  They can’t rehabilitate.  The whole idea is profoundly wrong to begin with and based only on retribution, revenge, taking the societies revenge out against their scape goats. The whole idea is so terribly flawed. There is no solution within a prison situation.  That’s one of the reasons we used to have, and I don’t know the current statistics, about a 94% recidivism rate, that is those prisons paroled, pardoned, finally let out will have about a 94%-96% return to prison.  Why, because nothing has changed and so we would rather spend all those huge sums of money in revenge, our revenge against them than we would in really trying to rehabilitate them which would take a different form, a different attitude and a completely different approach than prison itself.