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

dysregulation of the stress response can lead to increased inflammation, hypersensitivity

Dr. Felitti and Dr. Anda, researcher Shanta Dube

even twenty years after their subjects had been maltreated as children, four different markers of inflammation were higher than they were in those who hadn’t been maltreated.

When we realize that adversity in childhood harms the development and regulation of the

immune system throughout someone’s life,

strong correlation between autoimmune diseases and exposure to something environmental and specific—childhood adversity.

if an infant doesn’t have a caregiver’s reciprocal eye contact, stimulating facial expressions, snuggles, and kisses, hormonal and neurologic damage can occur,

and that can prevent a child from

growing and developing...

The licking and grooming behavior that occurred in the pups’ first ten days of life predicted changes to their stress response that lasted for the entire lifetime.

the changes continued into the next generation, because female pups who had high-licker moms became high lickers themselves when they had their own kids.

intergenerational cycle of toxic stress.

epigenetic.

both environment and genetic code shape both biology and behavior.

for epigenetic regulation, but the two that we know the most about when it comes to the genetics of stress are DNA methylation and histone modification.

mentioned, the key to keeping a tolerable stress response from tipping over into the toxic stress zone is the presence of a buffering adult to adequately mitigate the impact of the stressor.

The buffer is hugely important, not just to attenuate the stress hormones but also to

prevent the kind of epigenetic changes that lead to a dysregulated stress response and the major health issues that come with

of Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel of UCSF

that early childhood adversity predicts shorter telomeres in adults, showing us the lasting imprint that early stress has on cellular aging and disease processes.

healthy? One important way is by boosting levels of telomerase,

you can still slow decline by increasing your telomerase with things like meditation and exercise.

Dr. Alicia Lieberman at the University of California, San Francisco, a renowned child psychologist who specialized in child-parent psychotherapy (CPP). This type of therapy

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.

the quality of the relationship and the health of the attachment between the

parent and child are absolutely fundamental to health and well-being.

awakenings. Childhood adversity significantly increases the risk for just about every sleep

disorder there is, including nightmares, insomnia, narcolepsy, sleepwalking, and psychiatric sleep disorders

Nighttime sleep plays a powerful role in influencing brain function, hormones, the immune system, and ...

Sleep helps properly regulate both the HPA and the SAM axes. During sleep, levels...

and noradrenaline drop. As a result, lack of sleep is associated with increased levels of stress hormones and increased s...

The downstream effects are impaired cognitive function, memory, and mood regulation.

Lack of sleep is associated with increased inflammation and reduced effectiveness of the immune system.

regular exercise helped increase the release of a protein called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor),

BDNF is active in parts of the brain important for learning and memory, like the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.

moving our bodies builds our brains as well as our muscles.

Regular exercise has also been shown to help regulate the stress response and reduce the presence of inflammatory cytokines.

cytokines are the chemical alarms that fire up your immune system and tell it to fight.

meditation activates the resting-and-digesting system

(also called the parasympathetic nervous system).

The parasympathetic nervous system is respons...

like lowering heart rate and blood pressure, and it directly counters the effects...

Mind Body Awareness (MBA) Project.

toolkit of clinical interventions to combat the effects of toxic stress. Sleep, mental health, healthy relationships, exercise, nutrition, and mindfulness—we saw in our patients that these six things were critical for healing.

Fundamentally, they all targeted the underlying

biological mechanism—a dysregulated stress-response system and the neurologic, endocrine, and imm...

Dr. Denise Dowd

Victor Carrion

Daniel Lurie was the founder and CEO of the Tipping Point Community, a grant-making organization that had a goal of ending poverty in the Bay Area.