AM I TRAUMATISED? Pt. 1

While answering the question in the title of this series promises to be an humbling experience, looking deeply at the Greek concept of the wounded Self is also going to be more enlightening than you might expect. The information here presented will also help you identify potentially traumatizing behaviour, that is, behaviours you may be enacting unconsciously onto others whose psychological and physical health depends on you.

The word trauma comes from the Greek traumatikos which means wound, and a psychological wound is a series of mental and physical automatic reactions that is meant to attenuate the sense of overwhelmingness you felt during the traumatic event/s. You might have to read that again, because the same, decreases the quality of your mental and physical health despite the conditions of trauma not being there anymore. 

Now here is how trauma talking rose to fame in the last decade:

In the mid-'90s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente discovered an exposure that dramatically increased the risk for seven out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States. In high doses, it affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed. Folks who are exposed in very high doses have triple the lifetime risk of heart disease and lung cancer and a 20-year difference in life expectancy. And yet, doctors today are not trained in routine screening or treatment. Now, the exposure I'm talking about is not a pesticide or a packaging chemical. It's childhood trauma

Dr. Burke's presentation holds my breath. How could such seemingly innocent words as 'childhood trauma' be responsible for the long list of symptoms she mentions? 

She continues:

It was done by Dr. Vincent Felitti at Kaiser and Dr. Bob Anda at the CDC, and together, they asked 17,500 adults about their history of exposure to what they called "adverse childhood experiences," or ACEs....

What they found was striking. Two things: Number one, ACEs are incredibly common. Sixty-seven percent of the population had at least one ACE, and 12.6 percent, one in eight, had four or more ACEs. The second thing that they found was that there was a dose-response relationship between ACEs and health outcomes: the higher your ACE score, the worse your health outcomes. For a person with an ACE score of four or more, their relative risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was two and a half times that of someone with an ACE score of zero. For hepatitis, it was also two and a half times. For depression, it was four and a half times. For suicidality, it was 12 times. 

A person with an ACE score of seven or more had triple the lifetime risk of lung cancer and three and a half times the risk of ischemic heart disease, the number one killer in the United States of America. We now understand better than we ever have before how exposure to early adversity affects the developing brains and bodies of children. It affects areas like the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure and reward center of the brain that is implicated in substance dependence. It inhibits the prefrontal cortex, which is necessary for impulse control and executive function, a critical area for learning. And on MRI scans, we see measurable differences in the amygdala, the brain's fear response center. So there are real neurologic reasons why folks exposed to high doses of adversity are more likely to engage in high-risk behavior, and that's important to know

Trauma is the signature mark of a breach of your organism that was so severe that it could not be dealt with by normal mechanisms like fear, anger, sadness, disgust, or cognitive argumentation. It is what is left behind in the psyche and the body. It lives in you as a physical memory that involves your physical brain just as much as it involves your other organs and bodily systems. In this way, trauma is never past, but present. It is a present condition that began after the traumatic event/s, that lives in you like the heartbeat of the heart. 

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko