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

Activation of the stress response is one big way the environment can change epigenetic notations. As your body tries to adapt to the stress of your experiences, it turns certain genes on or off, particularly genes that regulate how you’ll respond to stressful events in the future. That process of the epigenome working with the genome to respond to your environment is called epigenetic regulation and it’s critical to our understanding of why toxic stress is so damaging to our lifelong health. When a four-year-old breaks a bone, that trauma is not encoded in his epigenome; it doesn’t affect him in the long term. 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.