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

knew from an early age that he wasn’t like other dads. As a biochemist, he turned every one of our kid “experiments” into an opportunity (ahem, demand) for discovery. When he came home from work to find me and my four brothers lobbing sharp-nosed paper airplanes at one another with wild glee, he didn’t yell at us to stop before we poked someone’s eye out. Instead, he sprang into action, commanding us to take measurements on the floor and time our throws. If you calculated how long it took an airplane to get from point A to point B, you could determine its velocity. And from that, knowing that gravity caused an object to accelerate at 9.8 meters per second squared, you could determine the lift under the wings and extrapolate the best angle at which to release the plane in order to hit someone.