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

four different markers of inflammation were higher than they were in those who hadn’t been maltreated.

For many families, it seemed that toxic stress was more consistently transmitted from parent to child than any genetic disease I had seen.

But when a four-year-old experiences chronic stress and adversity, some genes that regulate how the brain, immune system, and hormonal systems respond to stress get turned on and others get turned off, and unless there is some intervention, they’ll stay that way, changing the way the child’s body works and, in some cases, leading to disease and early death.

This serotonin didn’t just make the pups feel better, it also activated a chemical process that changed the transcription of the part of the DNA that regulates the stress response.

For each childhood adversity a study participant experienced, his or her odds of having short telomeres increased by 11 percent.

What they found was that overall, those with PTSD had shorter telomeres than those in the control group.

real conversations with kids about how trauma is affecting them and their families—even when kids are really little—are critical.

When there is no clear explanation, they make one up; the intersection of trauma and the developmentally appropriate egocentrism of childhood often leads a little kid to think, I made it happen.