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

children are particularly sensitive to repeated stress activation. High doses of adversity affect not only the brain structure and function but also the developing immune system and hormonal systems, and even the way DNA is read and transcribed. Once the stress-response system gets wired into a dysregulated pattern, the biological effects ripple out, causing problems within individual organ systems. Because the body is like one big, intricate Swiss watch, what happens in your immune system is deeply connected to what happens in your cardiovascular system. Next we’ll see the downstream effects of a stress-response system that has gone off the rails.