The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity

by Nadine Burke Harris

growing, multiplying, and causing illness. The

fight-or-flight response was designed for. That day, standing just outside my patient’s room in the hallway of the ICU, I smiled. Secretly, I felt as powerful and agile as a running back who had just leaped over a line of defenders and into the end zone. Nadine, 1; Grim Reaper, 0. Doctors don’t get to dance a shuffle like Ickey Woods of the Cincinnati Bengals when they do something they feel particularly good about, but I might have gone into the ladies’ room and done a fist-pump in the mirror. • • • My experience

don’t think people who grew up with ACEs have to “overcome” their childhoods. I don’t think forgetting

about adversity or blaming it is useful. The first step is taking its measure and looking clearly at the impact and risk as neither a tragedy nor a fairy tale but a meaningful reality in between. Once you understand how your body and brain are primed to react in certain situations, you can start to be proactive about how you approach things. You can identify triggers and know how to support yourself and those you love. This is about understanding how adversity disrupts the delicate ecosystems of family and overwhelm us.

It’s about recognizing that when it inevitably does happen, we can use what we’ve learned from science to do a better job helping ourselves and one another so we can better protect our children. As parents and caregivers, we can find it hard to admit when we’re struggling. It’s really easy to get caught up in feeling guilty and ashamed about all the ways, both real and imagined, that we have failed our kids. But one of the things I hope ...

character. We don’t need to play the shame game. It doesn’t help. I’m not saying that any of this is easy. If you’re someone with an ACE score of your own, learning to recognize when your stress response is getting out of whack can be hard. Taking the time and finding the resources to do self-care and get yourself on the path to healing can be even harder. If you’re a parent with AC...

care of yourself and protecting your child. Or, as we’ve learned, doing the former so you can do the latter. I learned about the powerful ability of trauma and adversity to shape who we are and how our bodies work as a physician on a quest to heal my patients, but in a sad and unexpected twist, I got to know it in a totally different way — as a mom. I know what it’s like to be an impaired parent. When I travel and...

to make other people feel comfortable. The truth is that we have five boys. One year before Evan had his stroke, I had a medical crisis of my own. Ziggy Harris was born on January 31, 2014, at 5:51 a.m. He lived for fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. The moment the nurse took hi...

Ziggy had been my secret friend for six beautifully anticipatory months. As any pregnant mother can understa...

took his first or last breath. He liked pineapple, hated the smell of cooking meat, and his favorite position was snuggling head-down on the right side of my womb. I was pretty sure he was pursuing a black belt in jujitsu based on the kicks that landed on my left rib cage. When we los...

But we have more now; we know more. I believe that we can rewrite the story of adversity and break the intergenerational cycle of toxic stress. I wrote this book for all of the parents, stepparents,

foster parents, grandparents, and caregivers of all stripes who are trying to figure out how to give the little people in their care the best shot in this world despite the difficulties life throws in their way and, often, despite their own histories of adversity. I wrote it for all of the children and young people in this world facing outsize challenges, and for the adults whose health is being shaped by the legacy of their childhoods. My hope is to inspire conversations — around dinner tables, in doctors’ offices, at PTA meetings, in courtrooms,

and at city councils. But my greatest hope is to inspire action — big and small. Whether it’s simply learning to recognize when your own stress response is activated and figuring out how to respond in a way that is healthy and not harmful to the people you love, or becoming a mentor to a child in need, or talking to your doctor, there is something that every one of us can do to change the way ...

the face, we will have the power to transform not only our he...