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

The main issue is that when the stress response is activated too frequently or if the stressor is too intense, the body can lose the ability to shut down the HPA and SAM axes. The term for this is disruption of feedback inhibition, which is a science-y way of saying that the body’s stress thermostat is broken.

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.

children’s need to create a story or narrative out of confusing events is actually very normal. Children are compelled to give meaning to what is happening to them. 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.

parents’ own rough childhoods and the scars that they still carried might affect the way they responded to their child in stressful or traumatic circumstances, hindering their ability to act as a protective buffer.