More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The privilege of some, like me, will be unmasked, while the vulnerability of others will be exposed.
This is what many people can’t or don’t want to recognize!
The inequities and flaws in our public systems will be magnified. Those with the least will be the most likely to be traumatized.
But I believe trauma can also arise from quieter, less obvious experiences, such as humiliation or shaming or other emotional abuse by parents, or the marginalization of a minority child in a majority community (growing up with “out-group” experiences can sensitize the stress-response systems
or the marginalization of a minority child in a majority community (growing up with “out-group” experiences can sensitize the stress-response systems
But understanding how patterns of stress can influence regulation, or balance, is the key to understanding how what happened to you is connected to your health—in all domains, mental, physical, and social.
Again, the ACE studies are tremendously important. But the ACE score doesn’t have much real predictive power on an individual basis, or as a clinical tool.
The ACE score doesn’t tell their story; the number can’t be their story.
What the ACE score does not tell you is the timing, pattern, and intensity of stress and distress or the presence of buffering or healing factors. It leaves out some of the most important variables involved in predicting health and risk.
Our major finding is that your history of relational health—your connectedness to family, community, and culture—is more predictive of your mental health than your history of adversity (see Figure 8). This is similar to the findings of other researchers
looking at the power of positive relationships on health. Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.
Our second major finding is that the timing of adversity makes a huge difference in determining overall risk. Put simply, if you experience trauma at age two, it will have more impact on your healt...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The basic finding is that the experiences of the first two months of life have
a
disproportionately important impact on your long-term heal...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Think of that: The child who has only two months of really bad experiences does worse than the child with almost twelve years of bad experiences, all because of the timing of the experiences.
But if these people misunderstand what’s going on, if these systems focus on “What is wrong with you?”—as, unfortunately, they typically do—the children won’t get better. They will continue to struggle.
And we recognize the power and potential of very early childhood. Think of the impact just a few months of consistent, predictable support for a young parent could make.
If we could support young parents in those first months, it would be like giving their children resilience-building megavitamins.
But…we don’t. Pro birth, not pro life
The value of early intervention programs, even those that have only brief “doses” of positive interaction, can’t be underestimated.
You can stand the emotional intensity of visiting the wreckage of your trauma-fractured life for only a few seconds before your brain starts to do things to protect you
from the pain.
For a moment he is back to the memory of Mom, the murder. He looks at the clerk, makes one brief comment—five seconds, tops—and gets reassurance. That was enough. One little fragment in the wreckage—a dose of therapeutic revisiting that he controlled. Because it is through controllable, brief revisits that the sensitized system can slowly, painfully be “reset.”
It is the therapeutic dosing that really leads to healing. Moments. Fully present, powerful but brief.
Interesting the number of times I have talked/questioned for too long.
What you’re really looking for is somebody to reinforce the idea that Hey, I’m not crazy. I’m thinking or feeling this way because of something that happened to me, and I’m having a reasonable reaction. And that person validates that for you.
Exactly, and, in “seeing” you, they regulate you.
These include recurring, unwanted images and thoughts of the traumatic event, and dreams or nightmares about it.
The second cluster is “avoidant” symptoms. We believe that these symptoms arise when someone feels distressed after being reexposed to people, places, or other reminders of the original traumatic events.
Just as my colleague was asking why some of them were wearing helmets, gunfire came from the jungle around the camp and several of the people fainted on the spot. They wore helmets so their heads wouldn’t be injured when they fell.
third: changes in mood and thinking.
Finally, the fourth symptom cluster is an alteration in arousal and reactivity.
The effects of trauma stretch far and wide across generations and across communities, and it’s important to always come back to our central question with compassion: What happened to you?
Even as an adult, as I tried to sleep, my mind was conditioned to stay in a constant state of arousal, prepared for attack.
While a different experience, I can relate to this A LOT!
The
fear of the grandparent becomes the fear of the parent, which becomes the fear of the child.
We are sensing and absorbing the emotions of those around us. This is particularly true when it comes to the people we spend most time with and are most dependent upon. Children, especially, are very contagious to the emotions of the people around them.
Hundreds of years of internalizing the trauma of racism, segregation, brutality, fear, and the dismantling of the nuclear family—all of it replicated and repeated over and over at the micro level of the individual and eventually seen and felt at the macro level of society.
The language we speak, the beliefs we hold—both good and bad—are passed from generation to generation through experience.
This is sociocultural evolution.
By stimulating specific neural networks in patterned, repetitive ways, we change the brain. This is an experience-based transmission of a skill from one generation to the next; teaching a child changes their brain.
The same is true of our beliefs—our humane and compassionate beliefs as well as our hateful, oppressive, dehumanizing beliefs.
Are they spending time with people who are different from them? Are they seeing diversity celebrated? Or are they being raised to fear
and judge anyone who doesn’t think or look or speak like they do? Generational transmission of bias can be disrupted.
This young man’s children, and grandchildren, still enslaved and enduring other traumas, would benefit from these epigenetic, molecular adaptations.
The study of epigenetics is still very young, and there is much more to learn, but it is conceivable that the experiences of our grandparents, great-grandparents, and ancestors even further back have had a significant influence on the way we’re going to express our DNA.
You begin to see that a person’s “worldview” can change their immune system, and that a positive conversation with a friend can influence how a patient’s heart or lungs function that day. The interconnectedness becomes clear. As you said, Oprah, everything matters.
She wasn’t manipulating the insulin or sneaking food. Asking what happened to her changed the dynamic regulation of her blood sugar.
This kind of dismissive attitude only adds salt to the wounds.
When someone is dysregulated, they simply cannot use the smartest part of their brain.
If the person is regulated, you can connect with them in ways that will facilitate rational communication. But if they’re dysregulated, nothing you say will really get to their cortex, and nothing already in their cortex will be easy for them to access.
This is essential to understand if you’re a teacher, because while the regulated child can learn, the dysregulated child will not.
