Childhood Disrupted

"Nakazawa writes compassionately for readers struggling to make sense of what happened during their childhoods and how their health may be affected . . . [An] engaging work of scientific translation."

Auteur

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is an award-winning science journalist, public speaker, and author of The Last Best Cure, in which she chronicled her yearlong journey to health, and The Autoimmune Epidemic, an investigation into the reasons behind today’s rising rates of autoimmune diseases. She is also a contributor to the Andrew Weil Integrative Medicine Library book Integrative Gastroenterology. Ms. Nakazawa lectures nationwide. Learn more at DonnaJacksonNakazawa.com.

Texte du rabat

Your biography becomes your biology. The emotional trauma we suffer as children not only shapes our emotional lives as adults, but it also affects our physical health, longevity, and overall wellbeing. Scientists now know on a bio-chemical level exactly how parents chronic fights, divorce, death in the family, being bullied or hazed, and growing up with a hypercritical, alcoholic, or mentally ill parent can leave permanent, physical fingerprints on our brains. When children encounter sudden or chronic adversity, stress hormones cause powerful changes in the body, altering the body s chemistry. The developing immune system and brain react to this chemical barrage by permanently resetting children's stress response to high, which in turn can have a devastating impact on their mental and physical health as they grow up. Donna Jackson Nakazawa shares stories from people who have recognized and overcome their adverse experiences, shows why some children are more immune to stress than others, and explains why women are at particular risk.

Résumé
A “courageous, compassionate, and rigorous every-person’s guide” (Christina Bethell, PhD, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) that shows the link between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) *​*and diseases, and how to cope and heal from these emotional traumas.

Your biography becomes your biology. The emotional trauma we suffer as children not only shapes our emotional lives as adults, but it also affects our physical health, longevity, and overall well-being. Scientists now know on a bio-chemical level exactly how parents’ chronic fights, divorce, death in the family, being bullied or hazed, and growing up with a hypercritical, alcoholic, or mentally ill parent can leave permanent, physical “fingerprints” on our brains.

When children encounter sudden or chronic adversity, stress hormones cause powerful changes in the body, altering the body’s chemistry. The developing immune system and brain react to this chemical barrage by permanently resetting children’s stress response to “high,” which in turn can have a devastating impact on their mental and physical health as they grow up.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa shares stories from people who have recognized and overcome their adverse experiences, shows why some children are more immune to stress than others, and explains why women are at particular risk. “Groundbreaking” (Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance) in its research, inspiring in its clarity, Childhood Disrupted explains how you can reset your biology—and help your loved ones find ways to heal. “A truly important gift of understanding—illuminates the heartbreaking costs of childhood trauma and like good medicine offers the promising science of healing and prevention” (Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart).

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Childhood Disrupted

CHAPTER ONE

Every Adult Was Once a Child

If you saw Laura walking down the New York City street where she lives today, you’d see a well-dressed forty-six-year-old woman with auburn hair and green eyes who exudes a sense of “I matter here.” She looks entirely in charge of her life—as long as you don’t see the small ghosts trailing after her.

When Laura was growing up, her mom was bipolar. Laura’s mom had her good moments: she helped Laura with school projects, braided her hair, and taught her the name of every bird at the bird feeder. But when Laura’s mom suffered from depressive bouts, she’d lock herself in her room for hours. At other times she was manic and hypercritical, which took its toll on everyone around her. Laura’s dad, a vascular surgeon, was kind to Laura, but rarely around. He was, she says, “home late, out the door early—and then just plain out the door.”

Laura recalls a family trip to the Grand Canyon when she was ten. In a photo taken that day, Laura and her parents sit on a bench, sporting tourist whites. The sky is blue and cloudless, and behind them the dark, ribboned shadows of the canyon stretch deep and wide. It is a perfect summer day.

“That afternoon my mom was teaching me to identify the ponderosa pines,” Laura recalls. “Anyone looking at us would have assumed we were a normal, loving family.” Then, something seemed to shift, as it sometimes would. Laura’s parents began arguing about where to set up the tripod for their family photo. By the time the three of them sat down, her parents weren’t speaking. As they put on fake smiles for the camera, Laura’s mom suddenly pinched her daughter’s midriff around the back rim of her shorts, and told her to stop “staring off into space.” Then, a second pinch: “no wonder you’re turning into a butterball, you ate so much cheesecake last night you’re hanging over your shorts!”

If you look hard at Laura’s face in the photograph, you can see that she’s not squinting at the Arizona sun, but holding back tears.

When Laura was fifteen, her dad moved three states away with a new wife-to-be. He sent cards and money, but called less and less often. Her mother’s untreated bipolar disorder worsened. Laura’s days were punctuated with put-downs that caught her off guard as she walked across the living room. “My mom would spit out something like, ‘You look like a semiwide from behind. If you’re ever wondering why no boy asks you out, that’s why!’?” One of Laura’s mother’s recurring lines was, “You were such a pretty baby, I don’t know what happened.” Sometimes Laura recalls, “My mom would go on a vitriolic diatribe about my dad until spittle foamed on her chin. I’d stand there, trying not to hear her as she went on and on, my whole body shaking inside.” Laura never invited friends over, for fear they’d find out her secret: her mom “wasn’t like other moms.”

Some thirty years later, Laura says, “In many ways, no matter where I go or what I do, I’m still in my mother’s house.” Today, “If a car swerves into my lane, a grocery store clerk is rude, my husband and I argue, or my boss calls me in to talk over a problem, I feel something flip over inside. It’s like there’s a match standing inside too near a flame, and with the smallest breeze, it ignites.” Something, she says, “just doesn’t feel right. Things feel bigger than they should be. Some days, I feel as if I’m living my life in an emotional boom box where the volume is turned up too high.”

To see Laura, you would never know that she is “always shaking a little, only invisibly, deep down in my cells.”

Laura’s sense that something is wrong inside is mirrored by her physical health. In her midthirties, she began suffering from migraines that landed her in bed for days at a time. At forty, Laura developed an autoimmune thyroid disease. At forty-four, during …