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

When your body’s stress-response system is overloaded again and again, it messes with the sensitivity of your dopamine receptors. You need more and more of the good stuff to feel the same amount of pleasure. The biological changes in the VTA that lead people to crave dopamine stimulators like high-sugar, high-fat foods also lead to an increase in risky behavior. The ACE Study shows that there is a dose-response relationship between ACE exposure and engaging in many activities and substances that activate the VTA. A person with four or more ACEs is two and a half times as likely to smoke, five and a half times as likely to be dependent on alcohol, and ten times as likely to use intravenous drugs as a person with zero ACEs.