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so she went to therapy to try and figure it out. The doctor she saw prescribed exercise and time to herself.
“Why don’t you use my personal trainer?” he suggested. “I insist.” When she saw her boss’s face, it dawned on her that perhaps she hadn’t been hiding her personal stress as well as she had thought. Caroline knew enough to accept his offer.
But it wasn’t long before her me-time became an issue for Nick, sparking an epic fight about her selfishness.
He began publicly posting his opinions about her online.
Eventually, they decided he should stop the medication for ADHD.
Initially, when Karl went off the medication, some of his problem behaviors returned.
Caroline spent time helping his teachers understand how...
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For years, he had missed out on learning those basic skills because he was so subdued. From then on, when the
challenging behaviors came back, Caroline, his teachers, and his therapist were able to address them in partnership successfully.
“It makes perfect sense that he did so much better because exactly what you did is the treatment for toxic stress.
Your stress response was dysregulated, which made it impossible to help him regulate his. That’s the mechanism that is so critical to understand. You getting out and taking care of yourself wasn’t selfish—it was the exact right thing to do for Karl.”
“Situations like yours are exactly why we need to do screening for everyone. Because most pediatricians, if they saw you, Ms. Gorgeous-Time-Magazine, roll into their exam room, they wouldn’t ask about potential adversity at home. They might be afraid of offending you or assume that because you’re so well put together, nothing like
as long as you’re doing some kind of regular exercise for about an hour a day, that’s what matters.
the more of the six things you do, the more you’ll reduce stress hormones, reduce inflammation, enhance neuroplasticity, and delay cellular aging.
“Of course, it’s also a good idea to cut out the stuff that accelerates inflammation and cellular aging, like cigarettes, and to minimize neurotoxins like alcohol,”
we, as humans, have a profound power to heal ourselves and one another.
We can damage each other’s health by repeatedly activating the stress response, but we also have the power to heal ourselves and others biologically.
oxytocin isn’t released only during childbirth; it’s also released during sex and with hugs and snuggles and healthy relationships. And it buffers the stress response by actually inhibiting the HPA axis—the brain and body’s stress-response circuitry. Plus, it has been shown to have antidepressant effects. We literally have the capacity to change our own and one another’s biology.
“Do you think your ex-husband had ACEs, Caroline?” asked Kathleen. “Absolutely.”
“It is ridiculous that everyone does not know this. How do we get people to pay attention to this as something that affects someone they love whether they know it or not?”
“People are upset! There was a big conversation about why it’s dangerous to screen for ACEs because it’ll be used to label low-income children of color as ‘brain-damaged,’”
“Did they not hear me say that this happens in every community? This is about basic biology.”
The greatest pushback comes from the folks who don’t know the science and aren’t doing it. I’ve never heard someone say, ‘I tried screening, but it didn’t work’ or ‘We had to stop.’”
my call for universal ACE screening came up and was met with some pretty fierce criticism once the floor was opened up for comment. The most passionate resistance came from a few people who felt I was “medicalizing” adversity when they, as community activists, had spent a long time trying to solve the inequities giving rise to it.
Somehow, all of that was missed and I was being painted as “that doctor from San Francisco telling us that our kids are brain-damaged.”
As she was presenting the data, Jeannette said, there was a woman sitting right in front of her who lowered her head and began sobbing. Jeannette remembered thinking to herself, This is the one time someone is actually being triggered by this.
“Because I understand now why I am this way. I understand why my siblings are this way. I understand why my mother raised us the way she did. I understand that I can break this cycle for my children and I understand that I’m not a victim, I’m a survivor.”
I can stop my children from having a score of eight, nine, or ten.” The young woman had scored a ten out of ten on the ACE screen.
Some providers were receptive, but others pushed back defensively, insisting they were the experts and that they provided excellent care—these patients were simply failing treatment.
What the researchers found was that the numbers fell within a few percentage points of Felitti and Anda’s results—demonstrating that Alberta was as affected by ACEs as anywhere else.
I knew that the doctor’s office wasn’t the only place that needed
fundamental understanding of toxic stress. This statement opened a hornet’s nest: one woman in particular wondered, as I heard later, whether ACE screening in schools could be used to label low-income kids and stigmatize them even further.
Dr. Cantor was asked to co-chair a partnership commissioned by the city’s department of education and help launch a study to investigate the traumatic effects of 9/11 on New York City’s public-school children.
The commonsense hypothesis going into the study was that the kids in schools closest to Ground Zero would be the most affected and would naturally need the most help.
As they lay sheet after sheet over each other, the team found that the data showed a totally different picture than any of them had expected. The distribution of trauma symptoms was not clustered around Ground Zero, which were largely middle-class neighborhoods. Instead, the greatest groupings of trauma symptoms corresponded strikingly with the communities of deepest poverty.
were also the communities that had the fewest resources.
get out into the schools and meet the actual children represented by these dots on a map. The first place she visited was an elementary school in Washington Heig...
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It was a shock to Dr. Cantor the first time she saw it, but as she visited more and more schools, she learned that it was typical for schools like this to contain middle-school-age kids who had been held back.
children closer to Ground Zero had many more sources of buffering that could help stabilize them in moments of acute trauma, even if it was severe.
That was what was affecting their ability to thrive and learn in school.
When she first set foot in the elementary school in Washington Heights, Dr. Cantor’s immediate reaction was burning outrage.
It wasn’t one or two kids, it was the entire school. When people hear the word trauma,
they often think it represents a small percentage of children requiring services in a typica...
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the students who required something beyond a traditional educational environment in order to be able to be ready and engaged in learning was much, much larger.
Turnaround for Children was founded after 9/11 with the recognition that while most schools inherently acknowledge the importance of mobilizing resources in response to acute
tra...
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The traditional model of school discipline was reactive and punitive (you do X, the consequence is suspension or expulsion), and that meant that a lot of kids were losing valuable time in the classroom.
Their approach had a profound impact on school culture.
All of the science suggested that the positive outcomes they were seeing should pave the way for improved learning, but despite all the wins on school culture and climate, test scores remained surprisingly stubborn.
She saw that educators often lifted up one practice as the solution to the problem.
