The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

by Nadine Burke Harris

Twenty years of medical research has shown that childhood adversity literally gets under our skin, changing people in ways that can endure in their bodies for decades. It can tip a child’s developmental trajectory and affect physiology. It can trigger chronic inflammation and hormonal changes that can last a lifetime. It can alter the way DNA is read and how cells replicate, and it can dramatically increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes—even Alzheimer’s.

there is a molecular mechanism behind every natural phenomenon—you just have to look for it.

levels of corticosterone can have an impact on levels of thyroid hormone, which regulates metabolism.

Is it possible that the daily threat of violence and homelessness breathing down your neck is not only associated with poor health but potentially the cause of it?

The body of research sparked by the ACE Study makes it clear that adverse childhood experiences in and of themselves are a risk factor

for many of the most common and serious diseases in the United States (and worldwide), regardless of income or race or access to care.

Having an ACE score of two or more doubles someone’s likelihood of developing an autoimmune disease.

The main issue is that when the stress response is activated too frequently or if the stressor is too intense, the body can lose the ability to shut down the HPA and SAM axes. The term for this is disruption of feedback inhibition, which is a science-y way of saying that the body’s stress thermostat is broken.

When you put a kid who had experienced adversity in an MRI machine, you could see measurable changes to the brain structures.

our patients with four or more ACEs were twice as likely to be overweight or obese and 32.6 times as likely to have been diagnosed with learning and behavioral problems.

a child’s brain forms more than one million neural

connections every second during the first years of life. I’d also seen firsthand during my medical residency that if that process got disrupted, by a toxin, a disease, or even physical trauma, the consequences could be serious.

We also know that dysregulation of the stress response can lead to increased inflammation, hypersensitivity (think allergies, eczema, and asthma), and even autoimmune disease (when

the immune system attacks the body itself), as with Trinity’s Graves’ disease.

What is so powerful about the follow-up ACE studies like the one Dube did is that they show a strong correlation between autoimmune diseases and exposure to something environmental and specific—childhood adversity.