Hi All, below is an announcement from Rutgers Health, and from me, about my talk at Rutgers on Thursday, May 31st. I wanted to give everyone the heads up on 2 things. 1. Due to a recent back injury I'm not yet able to travel (but I am getting better slowly!). 2. The amazing, caring and extraordinary team at Rutgers Behavioral Health will be using all kinds of cool technology to Skype me in, live, and we'll make it very interactive and fun! Bottom line: I'm so excited to deli…very my talk on Childhood Disrupted at what I know will be an amazing conference and wanted to let those of you who are attending know I'll be there, with my whole heart, albeit remotely.
Below is our short video message to this effect. (Please excuse the poor quality of my voice in the attached video -- on Thursday we'll be using external mics, the sound quality will be great!)
Please listen to my message here. https://vimeo.com/271790130/065fddccbf
Disturbing relationship between #neuroscience, #immunology, #SocialMedia use, and brain-immune mediated #mentalhealth problems, beautifully outlined in this important scientific article by my friend Ilia Elenkov. (Before making comments, please FIRST read the article!):
http://www.brainimmune.com/social-media-addiction-depressi…/
There’s been a recent controversy in #neuroscience as to whether the adult brain indeed makes new neurons (#neurogenesis). This matters in #trauma and #ACE Science for a very simple reason: neurogenesis in adulthood means the adult brain may be even more capable of #resiliency and #recovery — because the brain is more likely to be highly plastic and capable of making new healthy neural networks even decades after #ACEs and #toxicstress occurred in childhood. I’ve been following this scientific debate for awhile. Stay tuned. Bottom line: this is VERY good news today!: https://www.technologynetworks.com/…/even-old-brains-can-ma…
Honored to be keynoting and speaking at #DISRUPTTRAUMA event for Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care on May 31st. We'll do a really deep-dive into the #neuroscience and #immunology of #Aces and #toxicstress and talk in detail about how to reverse the longterm effects of #trauma and #stress to achieve a #resiliencereset and #healing -- for everyone. And of course we'll talk about implications for #treatment.
We'll also be practicing some trauma-self-awareness and narrat…ive writing practices to help practitioners be better able to heal within while healing others. (Oh, and every attendee will receive a free signed copy of #ChildhoodDisrupted!)
Practitioners, Educators, School Staff, Psychologists, Physicians, Nurses, Social Workers, Certified Counselors, Peer Support Specialists and any and all who support people living with histories of trauma -- please join us!
This program offers Continuing Education Credits. May 31, 2018!
https://ce-catalog.rutgers.edu/coursedisplay.cfm?schID=68749 … …
For a general view on the relationship between #ACEs and later health issues in adulthood, my article, Childhood, Disrupted, might be helpful. https://aeon.co/…/how-bad-experiences-in-childhood-lead-to-…
This is Part Two of my Three Part Series, Female Adversity: The Female Body and Brain on Toxic Stress
(CRUCIAL NOTE HERE BEFORE YOU READ: Boys’ immune systems become dysregulated in response to #toxicstress too, and that leads to disease and specific changes in brain architecture that we also need to talk about more openly AND compassionately. Today I’m focusing on girls’ unique immune response to #toxicstress and how this unique immune response is linked to #autoimmunediseas…e in particular. I promise a future post on boys, which is also an underserved topic. ACEs affect boys and girls. Today, here is the science on how they affect the female immune system in a few unique ways.)
So, exactly what happens in a girl’s body, in response to #toxicstress, that leads girls to be more likely to be ill with autoimmune disease as adult women? EVERY WOMAN WAS ONCE A GIRL. So, we should figure this conundrum out, right?
https://donnajacksonnakazawa.com/every-woman-was-once-a-gi…/
Hi All,
This three part post is about WHY Adverse Childhood Experiences are a #METOO ISSUE. I want to talk about how and why toxic childhood stress – also as #ACEs -- is a #metoo issue of the greatest magnitude. For girls and for the adult women they become.
Today, I’m posting the first part of my three-part exploration on Growing Up With Female Adversity: The Female Body and Brain on Toxic Stress:
…PART ONE: Why Girls Who Face #ToxicStress are More Vulnerable to Adult Illness: The Shocking Relationship Between Being Female, #ACEs, #AutoimmuneDisease and #Depression.
Click the link to read on. https://donnajacksonnakazawa.com/why-girls-who-face-toxic-…/
Three things I wanted to let you know about: later this weekend I’ll be posting a three part essay about women, toxic stress, and the female immune system — and why this topic matters now more than ever (more on that below!); an update on my next book, The Angel and the Assassin; and upcoming speaking events!
One thing readers know about the work I do and the books I write, including Childhood Disrupted, The Autoimmune Epidemic, and The Last Best Cure, is that I focus on the …
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When I lecture at universities, advocacy groups, hospitals, schools, etc., I’m often asked: what advice do you have for parents who have high ACE scores if they are trying to raise children with fewer ACEs?
Children with ACEs find “resiliency” because an adult provides a safe environment – in which they feel known, validated.
So that means that the most important thing adults can do is to manage their own stuff.
…Self-regulation by adults is a first step to help kids self-regulate themselves. Kids do best when the adults around them have strong stress management skills.
If we are caught in our own story of intergenerational trauma, we can’t see the kids we hope to help for who they are. They can’t be seen or known. They can’t be secure. We can’t soothe them because we are caught in trying to soothe ourselves.
So again, the best thing we can do for the children we care for is to manage our own stuff. Adults who’ve resolved their own trauma help kids feel safe.
In my book, Childhood Disrupted, I lay out a number of steps we can take with children. https://donnajacksonnakazawa.com/ I have devoted a whole section of the book to it. It’s so important!
These include ways to help make sure kids feel seen, known and validated, and scripts to help communicate with kids so that they feel safe, seen and known – while still imposing limits -- when we ourselves are feeling really stress- reactive.
One of these is to make sure that when we make a mistake, we make a repair. The sooner you make a repair, the less likely it is that an unhappy memory will “stick.”
When you are wrong, and admit it, child’s fear center of the brain – amygdala – stops lighting up! It calms down, promoting resiliency.
For example, if you over-react you might say, “I raised my voice and that might have scared you; I wish I hadn’t done that.”
Apologize.
If you lose your cool, or say or do the wrong thing, make a repair!
“I lost it and I wish I hadn’t said that; I’m sorry.”
You can apologize – and still impose limits!
“I am sorry that you are upset. It’s hard not to get your way. Our rule, as you know, is _________, and there are consequences for that.”
Again, I give entire lectures on ways in which we can help our children, based on my book – you can find much more in the book, in which I have an entire chapter devoted to raising resilient children and helping kids thrive.
I'm on a mission to help every individual who experienced childhood adversity have everything they need at their fingertips to help heal from the past, and for every home to be #trauma free, and every kid grow up #ACE free.
One thing I know to be true after 15 years as a science journalist. My readers are the best people on the planet.
You are hardworking, heartfelt women, and men, often in mid-life, working hard at careers and on behalf of causes that make the world better for everyone around you, frequently while raising kids and taking care of families -- all while struggling against a seemingly impossible tide of physical and autoimmune issues (and quite often anxiety, depression, too, whic…h makes sense, given that the immune-brain pathway is bi-directional).
You all get up everyday and do more for others and the world than any group of individuals I’ve ever known.
You make what I do so gratifying and worthwhile. Thank you. Thank you for the way you take time to reach out and let me know that the work I’m doing is helpful to you.
I write with the hope that the right words will help the right people at just the right time.
I’m working hard on my next book, out with Ballantine/Random House in Fall 2019. Stay tuned.
Meantime. Small five minute ask. If you ever have a few minutes to give a little review love for Childhood Disrupted on Amazon, B&N, etc., you’d be surprised by how much that helps me in my mission and the difference it can make.
It would help support my work and it would help my work to reach others, too.
(It takes a lot for me to ask for any support - I bet you can all relate to that too!)
If you post a review just let me know - cut and paste it and comment with it on this FB post, or link to it so I can say THANK YOU.
https://www.amazon.com/…/create-re…/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_wr_but…#
I devoted half of my book, Childhood Disrupted, to science-based interventions on how individuals can heal from the effects of ACEs. Here are some of the basics.
Here are some really important healing steps we can all take – which the science shows can help reverse the changes to our brains and DNA that might have occurred, growing up with ACES
Writing to heal. Research shows individuals who write about emotional upheavals and stressful experiences for 20 minutes each day, …
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People often ask me why I wrote #ChildhoodDisrupted. As a science journalist specializing in the intersection of neurobiology, immunology and emotion, I’d spent 20 years writing about the immune system and the human brain.
When I came across the CDC’s #ACE Study (Adverse Childhood Experiences Study), it struck me like a lightning bolt. I realized that after 20 years of writing about how we become ill and how we heal, I had been missing a huge piece of what can cause disease.…
Chronic unpredictable stress in childhood was changing the way in which the stress-response, and out immune system, functioned for life.
It also resonated for me on a personal level.
When I was 12, my father - a writer, a publisher, a man who taught me how to sail, how to laugh, to love Shakespeare - went into the hospital for routine surgery and never came out. When he died my childhood ended. It was as if someone had taken all the color out of the world.
So it made sense to me that my experience had changed me in every system and cell of my body. My body was set on high stress response when I was 12, and my body marinated in stress chemicals for a long time.
As an adult, I’ve been paralyzed twice, by the autoimmune disease Guillain-Barré Syndrome, I have a pacemaker, bone marrow issues, and other immune system concerns.
When I saw the research that showed that for every additional ACE score a woman had, the likelihood that she would be hospitalized with an autoimmune disease as an adult increased by 20 percent, I decided that I had to devote myself to helping people to better understand this research.
So I set out on a three year journey to read over 2000 #ACE studies and wrote #ChildhoodDisrupted https://donnajacksonnakazawa.com/childhood-disrupted/
Conventional wisdom tells us what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But the science tells us that far more often, the opposite is true. We have to change the way we think about children, adversity, and trauma.
I wrote Childhood Disrupted because I believe that CHILDHOOD SHOULD NOT BE DISRUPTED. We need to help every child grow up #ACE free. Which means parents w/ ACEs need help in resolving their own trauma so they can be the parents they want to be.
Many people ask me: How is it that what we might think of as less severe or “milder” trauma (living w/ depressed or alcoholic or verbally abusive parent) can change the brain in the same way as physical or sexual abuse? WHY do all these #ACEs affect the brain in similar ways?
We know that kids who are growing up with what we might think of as more common, living room variety traumas, such as a depressed or alcoholic parent, or being chronically put down, or humiliated by a p…arent, or simply neglected have the same rates of adult illness as those who suffered from physical and sexual trauma.
That’s because brain does not distinguish between “severe” trauma (violence, sexual abuse) and “milder” trauma.
If a child doesn’t know when the next bad moment is coming – whether it’s being humiliated and put down for being fat or stupid or in some way not good enough, or a slap in the face -- their brain goes into a state of hyper vigilance, waiting for the next bad moment, trying to predict when it will happen.
This hyper alert state creates changes in their stress response, that lead to changes in the genes that oversee the stress response for life. That’s why common forms of childhood stress can cause just as much damage as a parent who lashes out with angry, physical beatings.
Other types of childhood adversity include, of course, community violence, poverty, bullying, bickering parents, medical trauma.
When we see ACEs in this way, we would see the stress that kids encounter on social media today as an ACE, too. It may help to account for the escalating rates of anxiety and depression we see in today’s teens.
People often ask me: exactly HOW does trauma change the brain and the immune system? I write about this in #ChildhoodDisrupted, to help people understand this science -- and the complex interactions between the developing brain, the immune system, and emotion.
Chronic unpredictable adversity in childhood leads to a chronic state of “fight, flight or freeze.”
Researchers at Yale recently showed that when inflammatory stress hormones flood a child’s body and brain, they alter… genes that oversee our stress reactivity, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24655651
This can re-set the stress response to “high” for life, increasing the risk of inflammation, which can manifest later in cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases. In other words, stress promotes inflammation. #ACEs
When we understand that children who’ve faced #ACEs marinate in toxic and inflammatory chemicals, it makes sense how those experiences are tied to depression, autoimmune disease, heart disease, and cancer during adulthood.
Think about it: in no other area of medicine would we ignore such a strong genetic link to disease as we have with #ACEs and #chronicillness. Ignoring the link between #ACEs and adult illness is like ignoring the link between smoking and cancer.
Research shows children who experience maltreatment show fewer neural connections in important areas of the brain between the hippocampus, amygdala (or fear center) and the pre-frontal cortex. In individuals with ACEs the hippocampus is also six percent SMALLER and atrophied.
When neural connections in these important areas of the brain are affected, it’s harder to respond appropriately to the world. We are often either over-reacting or under-reacting to the world around us.
When we’ve faced early adversity our brain can become hyper-busy looking for confirmation that the world is a scary, dangerous place, and so are the people in it. It can feel as if life is an emergency This can lead to generalized anxiety, worsening our set point of well-being.
I think of Chronic Unpredictable Toxic Stress in childhood as C.U.T.S. (I'm a science journalist, we like acronyms ).
Chronic Unpredictable Toxic Stress in childhood, without the presence of reliable adults leads to profound changes in the brain and immune system. Which lead to adult disease. Here's more info on this in my piece for Psychology Today:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/…/7-ways-childhood-adversit…
for those who missed it
https://www.cbsnews.com/…/oprah-winfrey-treating-childhood…/
Hi all, those of you who've followed me for a long time know that I'm hardly the queen of social media especially when I'm researching and writing on deadline for a new book, which is very much the case right now. Last night, #ACEs were a topic on prime time #60Minutes. I tweeted some threads on ACE Science basics - they are short but encapsulate a lot. Here is one such thread (click on it and you'll see the whole thread). I'll post others over the next few days. (You can also find me on twitter @DonnaJackNak.) (I'm curious: do you all prefer Twitter or Facebook for complex science news these days? https://twitter.com/DonnaJackNak/status/972990420547448837
Hi All, for those of you on twitter I'm going to be doing a live tweet storm tonight during 60 Minutes hour on #ACEs. Sharing threads about ACE research that you might find helpful to your own healing journey. Coming up in a bit. You can find me on twitter at @DonnaJackNak https://twitter.com/DonnaJackNak
