Authored by John Bare 

Dr. Pamela Cantor is on a mission to awaken the world to the ways Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing, and Purpose can expand human flourishing.

“If people really understood trauma, they would make changes. Effects of trauma can be reversed,” Pam Cantor told attendees at the October 2024 gathering of Aspen Institute’s Opportunity Youth Forum.

“Trauma is not destiny.”

In her new book, Cantor stitches together what she’s learned from her life as a physician, a mother and grandmother, a writer, and a social entrepreneur. The headline: “Relationships are NOT the soft stuff. Our brains are electrical structures. The energy source is human connection. As the brain gets increasingly wired, neurons that fire together wire together. As this happens, we become able to do increasingly complex things.”

When we form close personal relationships, our brains soak up oxytocin and dopamine. We experience positive feelings. We like the feelings so much that we want to do it all over again. We are wired to seek out experiences that will reproduce the feeling.

“Oxytocin plus dopamine is the secret sauce,” Cantor said. “Dopamine is the reward pathway. Oxytocin sets up the conditions for belonging, purpose, curiosity and exploration.”

Across the country, OYF Collaboratives are engaging tens of thousands of young adults in work to transform systems so that everyone has an opportunity to flourish. The youth-led Collaboratives are embedding Belonging, Purpose, Wellbeing, and Meaning in education, job training, juvenile justice systems.

Cantor emphasized the power of relationships for young adults, a time when individuals are passionate about their future: “Adolescence is a period when we are saying, ‘I want a life. I want a relationship. I want a purpose. I want a future.’”

She pointed to problems with today’s education system, a “factory model” that rewards memorization and measure progress by test scores, not by the potential for individual growth. “How far we can go more important than were we start,” she said. “If Mozart or Martin Luther King or Mae Jemison were in today’s education settings, it’s likely the system would miss them. We would not know they were there.”

Cantor describes her book as “very personal. It is a story of the extraordinary amount of trauma I’ve experienced in my own life, and it explains the science of how people suffer and how people grow. The book will be a catalyst for changing narrative and changing mindsets about what is possible.”

Watch OYF Convening Fall 2024 Opening Plenary: Redesigning Systems to Support Thriving Youth