Quotes from Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Interestingly, recurrent humiliation by a parent caused a slightly more detrimental impact and was marginally correlated to a greater likelihood of adult illness and depression. Simply living with a parent who puts you down and humiliates you, or who is alcoholic or depressed, can leave you with a profoundly hurtful ACE footprint and alter your brain and immunologic functioning for life.

Adults with Adverse Childhood Experiences are on alert. It's a habit they learned in childhood, when they couldn't be sure when they'd face the next high-tension situation. After her terrifying childhood illness, Michele never felt at peace, or whole, as an adult: "I was afraid I could be blindsided by any small medical crisis that could morph and change my entire life.

It was as if I'd been running from my past, my story, my pain, and I'd run smack into myself again," she says.

There is a saying that you learn how to love others through the love others show you—but what if no one showed you how? Recent findings from interpersonal biology show that early losses and chronic unpredictable stress alter the neurocircuitry of the young brain in ways that dramatically change our later ability to create and nurture successful, meaningful relationships.

This is the new psychosocial theory of everything: our early emotional stories determine the body and brain's operating system and how well they will be able to guard our optimal physical and emotional health all of our adult lives.

Our brains construct a world that no one else can see, touch, or hear. Or, as Buddhist teachers sometimes say, "The truth is a pathless land.

In other words, Kat has a very high ACE Score of 5. And yet if you had met Kat at twenty or thirty, it's unlikely that you would have recognized the link between her childhood trauma and the many adult health—and life—hurdles that would later challenge her.

Imagine for a moment that your body receives its stress hormones and chemicals through an IV drip that's turned on high when needed, and when the crisis passes, it's switched off again. Now think of it this way: kids whose brains have undergone epigenetic changes because of early adversity have an inflammation-promoting drip of fight-or-flight hormones turned on high every day—and there is no off switch.

a person with an ACE Score of 4 or more is, statistically, 1,220 percent more likely to attempt suicide than someone with an ACE Score of 0.

That's when Kat realized that "I had let go of my pain, my story of loss, my victimhood, the grief and fear and sense of failure and shame and guilt from so much abandonment. I had to say good-bye to all the negative emotions that I had embodied over the years. Because when I let go, I was greeted by a new, deeper layer of wholeness, a sense of inner freedom.

kids whose brains have undergone epigenetic changes because of early adversity have an inflammation-pro-mot- drip of fight-or-flight hormones turned on high every day—and there is no off switch.

This is the new psychosocial theory of everything: our early emotional stories determine the body and brain's operating system and how well they will be able to guard our optimal physical and emotional health all of our adult lives. We

When the HPA stress axis is overloaded in childhood or the teenage years, it leads to long-lasting side effects—not just because of the impact stress has on us at that time in our lives, but also because early chronic stress biologically reprograms how we will react to stressful events for our entire lives. That

Most psychologists agree that a child has to develop a secure attachment with at least one primary caregiver in order to learn how to effectively regulate her own emotions for the rest of her life, and in order to learn how to become attached in a healthy way in adult relationships.

Adults who faced early life stress show greater erosion in what's known as telomeres—which are protective caps that sit on the ends of strands of DNA to keep DNA healthy and intact. As telomeres erode, we're more likely to develop disease, and we age faster. As our telomeres age and expire, our cells expire, and eventually, so do we.

Just six hours of meditation training and eleven hours of practice have been shown to strengthen the white matter tracks in brain regions that help to govern our emotional reactivity.

Ultimately, when you embrace the process of healing despite your Adverse Childhood Experiences, you don't just become who you might have been if you hadn't encountered so much childhood suffering in the first place. You gain something better: the hard-earned gift of life wisdom, which you bring forward into every arena of your life.

Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, "I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood." The