How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime | Nadine Burke Harris, Soren Gordhamer

so I'm so excited for this conversation and I would love to start your book just came out I know the deepest well and there's a story in that book about a someone named Diego and I'd wondered if we might begin by just telling us a little bit about that experience and also the inspiration that kind of brought you into this area of understanding trauma and how you how you kind of entered in this whole field yeah I it was a really interesting path for me I did my training as a pediatrician and also I have a master's in public health and when I finished my residency training I really wanted to put my skills to use to heal communities and so when I finished my residency I came to work for California Pacific Medical Center which is one of the biggest hospitals here in San Francisco and together we opened the clinic and in one of San Francisco's poorest and most underserved neighborhoods called Bayview Hunters Point and you know I was there doing all the things that I had been trained to do you know giving immunizations and doing nutritional counseling and all of these things you know all the stuff I learned in medical school but there was one patient Diego who I think I was noticing in my patients a disturbing trend and it was kind of at the back of my mind this idea that the adversity that we experienced in childhood could have anything to do with our health right cuz I didn't learn anything about that in medical school residency and then Diego was really the patient who who stopped me in my tracks and forced me to listen to that little voice at the back of my mind and he was a seven-year-old boy or he is I mean he's he's not seven anymore he's a seven-year-old boy and he came in to see me because his teacher told his mom to bring in bring him in to see me for ADHD and she said you know he needs Ritalin take him to his doctor and when I saw him I noticed a couple of things one was okay he was having behavior problems but he also had it you know asthma he also had eczema like the you know sensitive skin and skin rash and he also was really little just itty bitty in fact his even though he was 7 his height was average for a four-year-old and when I did what I was trained to do when I did a thorough history and physical and I asked mom when did you notice these behavioral problems starts what she told me you know after I had she became very tearful and I had Diego and his little sister go into the waiting room with my staff and she told me that his behavioral problems started after he experienced a sexual assault when he was 4 years old and as I started to put all the pieces together it was this idea that okay as a doctor I can look at all of these things separately right his you know his growth failure his asthma his eczema his behavior problems or I could try to understand if there was an underlying cause and in this situation the trauma that he had experienced was actually the underlying cause of all of his health problems Wow but that was not accepted at all at that time how did you negotiate or navigate something that the medical community has has yet to accept well a whole lot of data you know it's it's this interesting thing as a as a doctor and as a researcher it was really important to me to meet my colleagues where they are right rather than trying to tell them to come all the way over here it was really important for me to make sure that I was doing an incredibly rigorous job looking at the science and you know what I found when when I dove into the research was you know there was this study that was done by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente and they asked seventeen and a half thousand people about their history of childhood adversity and what they found was that number one most people had experienced at least some significant childhood adversity two-thirds of the population right and for those who did they look at ten categories of adversity and for those who experienced four or more their risk for seven out of ten of the leading causes of death in the United States of America right like heart disease stroke cancer chronic lung disease Alzheimer's suicide right was dramatically increased well I'm not talking about a little bit I'm talking about like double the risk for heart disease double the risk for cancer based on childhood adversity based on childhood adversity yeah one and a half times the risk for diabetes I mean it was it was not small right yeah and so you've been a pioneer in in making this more public how do you see us moving forward with this acknowledgement that so many children face adversity and trauma of different kinds some quite severe but my guess is like I feel like I've experienced trauma even though if you ask me what experience of trauma was I might tell you and you're like you weren't in a war zone and you you know you weren't abused in these ways but there's a feeling of having been impacted by events of those events kind of being held in the body yes and I'm wondering how do you see as a culture we can begin to acknowledge the pain that we that we have and begin to create communities and situations where that ping can not only be acknowledged but be potentially be healed well one thing I think that's really incredibly powerful for for me was really approaching this from a standpoint of looking at solutions right so you know we know that we have we have a cardiovascular system and we have a respiratory system we have all these different system in the body and we also have a stress response system right and particularly when we're exposed to adversity in childhood it changes the way that our stress response system functions and when we understand that then I think for a lot of people it's really scary right we we don't want to acknowledge it because especially when we're talking about trauma right our intuitive reaction when it comes to trauma is to keep it over there right it didn't happen I you know it's tough to acknowledge and certainly we don't want to talk about it in our society because there's so much stigma right and I'll tell you when I read all of the research about how childhood adversity affects our health for me it was so powerful it was it was hopeful because when we understand how the biology works then we can interrupt those processes right and what all of the research shows us is things like safe stable and nurturing relationships and environment are healing and I'm not talking about healing it made me feel better right I am talking about literally like my team at the Center for youth wellness was just did you know this huge study looking at randomized control trials that looked at the impact and they what they found in one study for kids who were in who were experienced maltreatment and they were in institutionalized care right when they were randomized into high-quality nurturing a high quality nurturing environment literally what we saw was changes in the in brain structure measurable on MRI Wow just through changing the the physical environment that's exactly right right for these kids and and it does make it like in this case they were looking at kids who had experienced that before age eight and then they did the MRI at age eight and what was not was that not only did they have changes in the brain structure but the kids who had gotten this high quality care their brains looked like kids who had never been maltreated well it had self healed or it what but that's the point the point is that safe stable stable and nurturing relationships they're not just nice to have they are healing like they literally change our biology and you know even we see this across species when you know a lot of folks in who do this research on childhood adversity you know there's a famous study by Michael Meany that I talked about actually I in the deepest well where he looked at he took rat pups right and he stressed him out and then he gave him back to their moms and some moms when they got their rat pups back they did a lot of like licking and grooming the human equally the the rat equivalent of hugs and kisses and guess what those rat pups they perform better on cognitive tests right the more healthy stress response system that turned itself off normally after it was done being activated and what they found was that these changes were associated with changes in the markers of the DNA of these rat pups but then they did a crazy thing this is why I love science with the next generation they switched the rat pups at birth and what they found was that the rat pups that were raised by these moms that did this high nurturing caregiving these high licking moms right even though they were genetically from wrap from moms who didn't do that being reared by high licking moms they perform better on cognitive tests they had a more normally functioning stress response and they also had the DNA markers and the DNA markers were associated with a mom that raised them not their biological mom Wow so literally nurturing caregiving can change our DNA uniform so it looks if we look at our society and in our society as many things right and and has has different components that work we also have things like the largest prison system in the world and our ways of working with people who are traumatized does not include any sense of those potential community healing experiences for the most part and so it feels like we've modeled a society I don't want to get too much into this it seems like we've created a society it makes kind of which doesn't understand or incorporate that intelligence whatsoever or that understanding because I think we'd have a much different social system we'd use our resources much differently do you see us do you see like basic simple things we can we can do to create to kind of create families and create a culture based on this understanding because it feels like it feels like if that is true funding for single mothers funding for social programs and low-income communities all this would make so much sense and save so much money but it's not yet part of what we think of as health or what we think of as sustaining a healthy society how are you being received with this information do you feel like there's openness and there's receptivity there is but the thing that I would say in terms of what we all can do to be part of advancing a society that is that reflects this understanding so number one it starts at home right like we have to do our own pulse check we have to understand and be reflective of how you know whether we've had our own experiences of adversity and how that's impacting our day to day how we show up and what we are doing unfortunately you know in the deepest well one of the things I do is I talk about is you know what are some of the interventions that we can do for ourselves right things like you know a regular mindfulness practice and things like regular exercise certain types of diets that help to improve you know neuroplasticity reduce all the inflammation that's associated with early adversity and all of those types of things so that I think you know it's beginning with that I think it's really important and then what feels really powerful the next piece is raising awareness you know back in the day right we used to do in every society we used to do crazy stuff right like when people had mental illness we'd be like oh my god they're so scary we're gonna lock them away we had them in sanatoriums and then we figured out oh my goodness you know what this is an illness right like it's mental and we still don't have parity in our care of mental illness but the idea as a society it's like okay we we've agreed that this is a health condition so you can't just put people in sanatoriums right if people can be helped to some degree that's exactly right because there's an opportunity for intervention I do believe that in our society right now like for example if you were to look at the percentage of people in our in our justice system especially in our juvenile justice system a history of significant childhood adversity we may recognize that our society right now seems to be doing something very similar to the sanatorium practice and the idea of wait a minute for folks who have high doses of early adversity that can impact their their neurologic function it can impact their impulse control it can impact their their executive functioning all these things and there's something that we can do about that yeah and we can do number one everyone y'all get out there and you know advocate routine screening for adverse childhood experiences right now only four percent of pediatricians in America are regularly screening for adverse childhood experiences right that's not considering all of the health implications and then and then we can do we can begin advocating for resources to do the things the early intervention programs mental health services family supports to generation interventions all of these things can significantly improve outcome great beautiful and can you say about your own I know this has a there's some level of personal experience you have here and you also have your own meditation practice yeah how do you yeah can you say a little bit about your personal experience and also how you maintain your own kind of well-being as you write and do book tours and involved and show up at conferences how you kind of are exploring tending that you have for children yes listen when we're talking about two-thirds of Americans who have experienced some type of childhood adversity we're not talking about them we're talking about us right and so for for myself and it's something that I talk about in the deepest well putting this science and to practice is really about you know living better every day I mean I've just been on a crazy book tour and coming back what I was in the middle of my book tour and I was like I need to be making sure I do my meditation twice a day like I cannot let it slip because for me the more busy I am the more important it is for me to be centered and being connected and and actually practicing what I preach in terms of you know yeah and there's so many different questions I know our time is short here but what is it that what is it that so the deepest wells available now that you can get it actually it's in our bookstore you can also get it on Amazon what it what is it that moves you now and do you see that there is enough understanding of what actually heals trauma yeah I know you had mentioned there's certain practices that help to heal trauma over time have you found that there are certain things that are particularly beneficial for people who are out there who are like wow I actually feel like I've been through something I'm one of those 2/3 from your research is there besides being in a like a supportive family and doing diet and mindfulness practices are there other things that can help somebody kind of tap into that but you guys I think a lot of us are moving so fast we're afraid if we stop I'm actually gonna feel my trauma I'm actually gonna feel my pain I'm actually gonna feel my anxiety I'm actually gonna feel all these things I'm just gonna keep going faster and faster and I'm wondering what from your research you've if you have anything that would support somebody in kind of investigating that the most important thing that I think that individuals who have a history of adversity can do is just by start with number one recognizing what's going on in the first place and this is something that I actually tell my patients I say you know because of what you've experienced your body may be making more stress hormones than the average person and that can look and feel like being quick to anger or having trouble controlling your impulses or getting sick easily when you feel overwhelmed and I will tell you the number one thing that my especially you know my older patients might lessons they say to me it's oh you mean I'm not crazy like just the idea that this is what this system that is designed by our bodies to help protect us right that it become become overactive sometimes I think it allows people to be able to have some self compassion yeah right and it also allows us to be able to understand like oh okay when that happens like when I get that feeling oh that's just my body stress response so you know what let me just let me just dial that in and maybe I need to step up my workout or maybe I need to make sure that I'm being really good on my nutrition or laying off you know the alcohol or connecting with a dear friend or talking to my therapist but you know all of these things and this is this this has been my great hope in writing the deepest well is to help people understand number one to make that connection and then number two to see that there is hope for healing yeah and that's the most important thing is that hope beautiful and I think that this piece of Mecca passion it's also it's really hard to blame somebody who's had a lot of adverse childhood experiences if you really understood their life it would make complete sense that they're acting out or whatever way they're acting out and I feel like we have a my vision anyways is we have a leaders I think so many today that are acting from some trauma experience and it's played out but it's playing out and if there was this if there was this way in which if there was this way in which that became of course you've been through trauma and of course you're acting it out and let's talk about it and let's look into it I know that that if your work was understood that we would birth a whole new generation of people who could actually speak to that well we're laughing about it but we're understanding that when we have leaders who have difficulty with impulse control right yeah when we have leaders right who who really are coming out of this react please and their executive function is not engaged like we need as many people in leadership positions using their so yeah I mean this is a matter of when we talk about it we can kind of joke and laugh about it but ultimately when we think about the changes that need to happen in our society that also help all of us to have a healthier more prosperous and more secure society this it's really important that this word gets out beautiful and I know you have four boys and I think men it's particularly challenging men are not you know they're used to keeping up like this particular front like I've got it yeah I've got everything taken care of I'm the man I can do this I can do that and for there to be a healing and a vulnerability an understanding of the dimensions of a pain that still exists enjoy but it feels like that if if we can support that process and I know your book is a big step in doing that to me that it's just such a positive thing and almost like I don't know if there's a way our we can survive for a couple generations without that understanding yes I'm afraid we'll keep kind of creating conditions where there's all this attraction towards leaders that embody something completely different so I want to thank you for your work and thank you for coming and if you want to get the book it's available but also I feel like you kind of create an invitation for all of us to acknowledge what's really true for us and I think it's hard to acknowledge our joy and are amazed in generosity and also we need to acknowledge the the wounds that we might still carry yeah and together we form a humanity based on all of it and not just taking our part so yeah thank you so much thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Wisdom 2.0 with Soren Gordhamer

Views: 36,879

Keywords: Nadine Burke Harris, Soren Gordhamer, Wisdom 2.0, 2018, San Francisco, Mindfulness, Meditation, Technology, Wisdom, Soren

Id: X7xBbgxfvU4

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 29 2018