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

when I looked at my patients with high ACE scores, I couldn’t help but think that if I treated just the asthma or the obesity or the behavior problem, I was a really poor student of history. We know from the research that the life expectancy of individuals with ACE scores of six or more is twenty years shorter than it is for people with no ACEs. For a patient with a high ACE score, it may not be the obesity that shortens his or her life but the underlying toxic stress that the obesity is signaling. To treat the root of the problem I had to look at both stories my patients’ symptoms were telling me: the story on the surface and the story underneath.