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

Most people know that DNA is the genetic code, the basic blueprint for your biology. To take that understanding a step further, your body uses this code as a template to produce the proteins that make up new cells and ensure that all the things inside those cells function. Every cell has your entire genetic code in it as well as the machinery to read the code and decide which parts of the sequence to translate into proteins. Environment and experience play a huge role in determining which parts of your genetic code are read and transcribed in each new cell your body creates. How does your experience or environment do that? Well, it turns out that the body doesn’t actually “read” every “word” of its DNA. What scientists have discovered is that baked into the cells are both the genome (your entire genetic code) and the epigenome, another layer of chemical markers that sit on top of your DNA and determine which genes get read and transcribed into proteins and which ones don’t. The term epigenetic actually means “above the genome.” These epigenetic markers are handed down from parent to child along with the DNA. One way to think about it is this: The genome is like the musical notes in sheet music and the epigenetic markers are like the notations that tell you how loudly, quietly, quickly, or slowly to play the notes. There might be a notation to skip an entire section of music altogether. These epigenetic notations are subject to experience, to being rewritten by your environ...