I happened to be reading Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’s book in my neurologist’s waiting room. He was running late, so I had an hour and a half to take it all in.
Harris is interested in how the effects of childhood trauma follow people into their adult lives, causing chronic and acute illnesses and a shorter life span.
Childhood trauma is measured via the ACE score–a 10-point test to determine how fucked up your childhood was (a point for a dead parent, a point for witnessing your mother being abused, etc.). The score on the test I found online a few years ago, at my doctor’s urging, was 8. The one Harris uses has me at a 7.
Harris notes that there are also cultural childhood adversity problems:
“In rural white communities, the story is about loss of living-wage work and the fallout from rampant drug use. In immigrant communities, it is abut discrimination and the fear of forever being separated from loved ones at a moment’s notice. In African American communities, it’s about the legacy of centuries of inhuman treatment that persist to this day–it’s about boys being at risk when they are playing on a bench or walking home from the store wearing a hoodie. In Native American communities, it is about the obliteration of land and culture and the legacy of dislocation. But everyone is really saying the same thing: I am suffering.
“It is easy to get stuck on your own suffering because, naturally, it is what affects you most, but that’s exactly the mentality that is killing black people, white people, and all people. It perpetuates the problem by framing it in terms of us versus them. Either we get ahead or they get ahead. . . . the science shows us that it is not us against them. In fact, we all share a common enemy, and that common enemy is childhood adversity” (195).
I knew some of the science, but reading it all at once was difficult:
“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” (xv).
“A person with an ACE score of seven or more has triple the lifetime odds of getting lung cancer and three and half times the odds of having ischemic heart disease, the number one killer in the United States. If a large study . . . came out tomorrow saying that exposure to cottage cheese tripled your lifetime chances of cancer, the Internet would break and the dairy lobby would hire a crisis-management firm (40).
I have to say, I don’t like my odds.
But like all good books, this one’s stories moved me, scared me, most. One of the patients Harris describes is severely under weight. Something bad happened, and he just stopped growing, stopped thriving.
I don’t remember a lot of things that happened to me early on–my mother wanting to leave my father for his constant womanizing, his giving her a black eye, her fleeing with baby me.
My grandparents often told a story about when I came to live with them when I was 2. I was so small that they took me to a doctor. My grandparents were told that I was okay, but that I would be a tiny thing. But they didn’t believe the doctor, who said I would never make it to 5′. So they gave me small quantities of beer to increase my appetite and milkshakes filled with eggs.
And I wasn’t actually okay. All of a sudden I had life-threatening asthma, requiring frequent hospitalizations.
By the time my grandparents took me in, I was failing to thrive. I somehow hadn’t made that connection before reading this book.
What shook me most, though, was reading about all the studies showing that loving, stable homes can help people recover from trauma.
And I thought about another story my grandmother liked to tell. Their tiny little me was unconscious, and they couldn’t wake me up. They were packing me into the car for the hour trip to the hospital. Grandma saw (Grand)daddy packing his pocket with cigars and asked what he was doing.
“They’re going to want to keep her overnight. And I’m not leaving her there alone.”
And that was why, thinking about the loving, stable home my grandparents tried to give me, I cried in my neurologist’s waiting room.
