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

Why were people so resistant to the science of adversity and to giving a basic fact of our biology a name and a number? Because when you bring it down to the level of cells, the level of biological mechanisms, then it is about all of us. We are all equally susceptible and equally in need of help when adversity strikes. And that is what a lot of folks don’t want to hear. Some want to stand back and pretend that this is just a poor-person problem. Others take fierce ownership of the problem and say, “This is killing my community,” but what they also mean is It’s killing my people more than yours. In rural white communities, the story is about loss of living-wage work and the fallout from rampant drug use. In immigrant communities, it is about discrimination and the fear of forever being separated from loved ones at a moment’s notice. In African American communities, it’s about the legacy of centuries of inhuman treatment that persist to this day—it’s about boys being at risk when they are playing on a bench or walking home from the store wearing a hoodie. In Native American communities, it is about the obliteration of land and culture and the legacy of dislocation. But everyone is really saying the same thing: I am suffering. It is easy to get stuck on your own suffering because, naturally, it is what affects you most, but that’s exactly the mentality that is killing black people, white people, and all people. It perpetuates the problem by framing it in terms of us versus th...