The Deepest Well Quotes

“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.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“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. Instead of shutting off the supply of “heat” when a certain point is reached, it just keeps on blasting cortisol through your system. This is exactly what Fisher and Bruce were seeing in the foster kids.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“Once again, the science is new, but it suggests that even if you start out with shorter-than-normal telomeres, you can still slow decline by increasing your telomerase with things like meditation and exercise.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“Researchers have found that infants of depressed moms have a harder time regulating their sleep; they sleep an average of ninety-seven fewer minutes a night than infants of nondepressed moms and have more nighttime awakenings.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“This might sound simple, but I cannot overstate this: The single most important thing is recognizing what the problem is in the first place.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“These pups are not damaged goods; they are not defective. If they can get a safe, stable, and nurturing environment at an early age, the biology says that this sets them up to develop a healthy stress-response system in adulthood. As we’ve mentioned, the key to keeping a tolerable stress response from tipping over into the toxic stress zone is the presence of a buffering adult to adequately mitigate the impact of the stressor.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“Twenty years of medical research has shown that childhood adversity literally gets under our skin, changing people in ways that can endure in their bodies for decades. It can tip a child’s developmental trajectory and affect physiology. It can trigger chronic inflammation and hormonal changes that can last a lifetime. It can alter the way DNA is read and how cells replicate, and it can dramatically increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes—even Alzheimer’s.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“If we put the right protocols into place in pediatric offices across the city, country, and world, we could intervene in time to walk back epigenetic damage and change long-term health outcomes for the roughly 67 percent of the population with ACEs and their children. And, someday, their great-grandchildren.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“understanding that exposure to early adversity affects the way dopamine functions in the brain is an absolute must.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“struggling in school but being told that they had ADHD or a “behavior problem” when these problems were directly correlated with toxic doses of adversity.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“The profound discovery was that our patients with four or more ACEs were twice as likely to be overweight or obese and 32.6 times as likely to have been diagnosed with learning and behavioral problems.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity

“When you put a kid who had experienced adversity in an MRI machine, you could see measurable changes to the brain structures.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“Toxic stress response can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress-response systems can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“Lots of kids wet the bed when they are little but grow out of it. An example of a tolerable stress response would be a child who reverts back to bedwetting after his parents’ divorce. The split isn’t acrimonious, and while the dad moved out, both adults are committed to co-parenting and understand that their child needs stability and extra support. As a result of that buffering of the child’s stress, he stops wetting the bed after a few months. Like my drive-by-induced stress, the effects are temporary if a solid support network is in place.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“Childhood adversity is a story we think we know. Children have faced trauma and stress in the form of abuse, neglect, violence, and fear since God was a boy. Parents have been getting trashed, getting arrested, and getting divorced for almost as long. The people who are smart and strong enough are able to rise above the past and triumph through the force of their own will and resilience. Or are they?”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“And just like two siblings with the same parents might have different eye colors, they also might have different lengths of telomeres, which can lead to different outcomes even if they experience similar doses of adversity.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“In the case of a human, it could be a dad hugging and listening. The buffer is hugely important, not just to attenuate the stress hormones but also to prevent the kind of epigenetic changes that lead to a dysregulated stress response and the major health issues that come with it.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“What I hadn’t learned was how to break the intergenerational cycle of toxic stress.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“The licking and grooming behavior that occurred in the pups’ first ten days of life predicted changes to their stress response”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“a person with an ACE score of two or more had twice the odds of hospitalization for autoimmune disease as someone with zero ACEs.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“the difference between adaptive and maladaptive reactions is all about the when.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity

“Sleep, mental health, healthy relationships, exercise, nutrition, and mindfulness—we saw in our patients that these six things were critical for healing. As important, the literature provided evidence of why these things were effective. Fundamentally, they all targeted the underlying biological mechanism—a dysregulated stress-response system and the neurologic, endocrine, and immune disruptions that ensued.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“Having an ACE score of two or more doubles someone’s likelihood of developing an autoimmune disease.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“But to me, the most interesting part of what they found was that stress had a major impact on the length and health of telomeres, and that in turn had a major impact on the risk of disease.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“The licking and grooming behavior that occurred in the pups’ first ten days of life predicted changes to their stress response that lasted for the entire lifetime. Even more startling, the changes continued into the next generation, because female pups who had high-licker moms became high lickers themselves when they had their own kids.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“Because I understand now why I am this way. I understand why my siblings are this way. I understand why my mother raised us the way she did. I understand that I can break this cycle for my children and I understand that I’m not a victim, I’m a survivor.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“The amygdala: the brain’s fear center Prefrontal cortex: the front part of the brain that regulates cognitive and executive function, including judgment and mood and emotions Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis: initiates the production of cortisol (longer-acting stress hormone) by the adrenal glands Sympatho-adrenomedullary (SAM) axis: initiates the production of adrenaline and noradrenaline (short-acting stress hormones) by the adrenal glands and brain Hippocampus: processes emotional information, critical for consolidating memories Noradrenergic nucleus in the locus coeruleus: the within-the-brain stress-response system that regulates mood, irritability, locomotion, arousal, attention, and the startle response”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“The problem with PTSD is that it becomes entrenched; the stress response is caught in the past, stuck on repeat.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“The consequences of toxic stress are not just neurologic and hormonal; they are also immunologic, and those symptoms are much more difficult to spot.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

“As a scientist, I couldn't accept these kinds of associations without some serious evidence.”
― Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity