Photograph by Craig Ruttle / Redux
As I write this, the U.S. House of Representatives is debating a resolution to invoke the 25th amendment to the Constitution, and tomorrow will debate and will likely impeach President Trump for the second time.
People have asked me why I had not written about the events of last Wednesday, January 6 — a traumatizing day that will be seared in our long history of trauma in this country — sooner than this evening. Basically, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, because this isn't over.
I was also listening to what people in our ACEs Connection community as well as the greater ACEs movement were saying about last week's insurrection. We were all pretty much saying the same things that most people in the nation and the world were saying. First, about the violence, which was horrendous, terrifying, unreal. And then further disbelief, as well as rage, about why a mob of mostly White rioters was let loose on the U.S. Capitol, the people's house, for six hours without consequences when just months before Black Lives Matter protestors who were practicing their First Amendment rights and were not violent, were tear-gassed, beaten, and arrested.
Below, I'm re-posting an article published last July about how President Trump's childhood adversity shaped his life, based on an amazing book by his niece, Mary Trump. Last week demonstrated how much he has shaped ours in his run-away four-year screeching slide into a metaphorical train wreck. Many people warned of this; Mary Trump could see it coming. At the root of all his actions over the last decades, and especially the last four years, is his childhood trauma.
Adverse childhood experiences are also at the root of the behavior of people in the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. People who are happy and healthy, who have a promising future for themselves and their children — i.e., those that have had enough positive childhood experiences to counter the inevitable adverse childhood experiences, and aren't trapped in the downward economic spiral that has trapped most of the people in our country — those people don't storm buildings, don't erect posts with a noose, don't threaten the Vice-President of the United States and the U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives with a guillotine or hanging.
But we're stuck in a generational escalation of ACEs. Idaho just did an ACE study and found that an astonishing 23 percent of adults, who are overwhelmingly White, have an ACE score of 4 or more. The original ACE Study showed 12 percent of adults with ACEs. Too many ACEs lead to substantial violence, being a victim of violence, chronic disease and mental illness (more information in the article below). People who have an overabundance of ACEs live out their lives in a number of predictable ways: They endure lives of depression, over-achieving, extreme anger, and/or anxiety. People who use anger to cope with their ACEs will latch onto anything that satisfies the craving for hate, including racism, hate groups, misogyny, etc., just as opiates satisfy the craving for relief from depression and anxiety. Fueling their hate is the belief that the world is a dangerous place, based on the traumatic experiences seared into their tiny bodies and brains when they were babies.
Last week most White people had yet another awakening (after George Floyd last year). Most Blacks and Native Americans did not, because they already knew that this country was not a safe place. They have already experienced this violence, for centuries. Those of us who didn't understand what Donald Trump represented now realize that we have a very long way to go to create a nation of communities that are self-healing.
At ACEs Connection, and in the ACEs movement, we're in this for the long haul. We know it will take a long time for the country as a whole to heal. I hope we've made a strong start. I hope our efforts come in time...to ameliorate the hurt in this country, to have enough individual and community resilience to survive, and perhaps even thrive, during these next decades of climate change.
Trump's story is a cautionary tale for all of us. For many people, last week's insurrection put the last four years into a different and dangerous light. Ahhh, hindsight. But the basic rule is: Hurt people hurt people, no matter how much or little money or prestige they have. Without significant intervention and healing, people who have significant childhood adversity — and little of the necessary nurturing required as babies and toddlers to grow into healthy adults — are incapable of change. That's why Mary Trump kept saying her uncle would remain on his destructive path. I hope we put the knowledge to good use in future elections.
Over the next year, we'll be addressing more outcomes of last week's travesty, such as how to punish the people who stormed the Capitol and threatened extreme violence if we purport to live in a world that's informed by ACEs science where we move from blame, shame and punishment to understanding, nurturing and healing? And how do we convince the news media to provide solution-oriented reporting instead of the day-in, day-out blast of toxic news that might tell us what happened, but not what we can do about it? How do we finally change our systems to provide acknowledgement and reparations to Native Americans, Blacks, and other disenfranchised people for past traumas, to have those in power acknowledge their privilege and learn that they don't need it, and to create safe communities for everyone? Admittedly, this last point has some real blue-sky thinking, but it's possible.
I look forward to hearing what you think about all this.
July 28, 2020
Donald Trump is the product of abuse and neglect. His story is common, even for the powerful and wealthy.
A baby is born into a family where he’s ignored by his father. When he does receive his father’s attention, his father constantly yells at, criticizes or punishes him. For the first two years of his life, this child’s mother is perfunctorily attentive, but not loving, and then abandons him for a year. From the time he was born until he is an adult, he witnesses his father abuse his older brother by terrorizing him verbally. This leads to his older brother becoming an alcoholic and dying at the age of 42. He sees his parents engaged in an emotionally neglectful, if not emotionally abusive, marriage.
This is the story of the early years of President Donald J. Trump, according to the captivating book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” The book was written by the president’s niece, Mary L. Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump’s older brother. It bursts open the doors to understanding why Donald Trump behaves the way he does. It is also is a cautionary tale for how we decide who becomes a leader, whether that leader is a president, CEO, judge or school superintendent.
In Mary Trump’s words: “Child abuse is, in some sense, the experience of ‘too much’ or ‘not enough.’ Donald directly experienced the ‘not enough’ in the loss of connection to his mother at a crucial developmental stage, which was deeply traumatic. Without warning, his needs weren’t being met, and his fears and longings went unsoothed. Having been abandoned by his mother for at least a year, and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved, valued or mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life.”
Anyone who knows about the science of adverse childhood experiences has suspected all along thatcritical aspects of the president’s formative years contributed to his behavior today.
Mary describes Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, as a “high-functioning sociopath.”
“In order to cope,” writes Mary, “Donald began to develop powerful but primitive defenses, marked by an increasing hostility to others and a seeming indifference to his mother’s absence and father’s neglect….In place of [his emotional needs] grew a kind of grievance and behaviors—including bullying, disrespect, and aggressiveness—that served their purpose in the moment but became more problematic over time. With appropriate care and attention, they might have been overcome.”
But Donald Trump had practically no positive childhood experiences that could buffer the abuse he endured. “Unfortunately, for Donald and everybody else on this planet,” writes Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, “those behaviors hardened into personality traits…”
Donald Trump didn’t have a chance. The only thing that kept him from ending up as a small-time crook with a prison record is money, and lots of it.
Most people think of child abuse as sexual abuse or the physical abuse of being beaten. But the science of adverse childhood experiences found that other types of childhood abuse—experiencing emotional abuse, emotional neglect, living with a parent who’s addicted to alcohol or other drugs or is mentally ill, having a relative who’s incarcerated or witnessing a mother being abused, witnessing a sibling being abused, bullying, racism and other traumatic experiences—can do just as much damage. That’s because the brain itself can’t distinguish between types of trauma. It’s all just trauma that a child’s brain has to adapt to in order to survive. For example, when a father’s only interactions with a child are to suddenly rage without warning, the stress hormones in the child’s brain trigger a kid to flee for his life, fight or freeze in fear. And if that kid has to protect himself from that father every day, eventually that kid’s brain is altered.
Science is very clear that babies need two important types of positive experiences to lay a solid foundation for a healthy life, notes Mary Trump. One is physical and emotional closeness: “Being held and comforted, having our feelings acknowledged and our upsets soothed are all critical for the healthy development of young children.”
The second is mirroring, “the process through which an attuned parent reflects, processes, and then gives back to the baby the baby’s own feelings,” she writes. “Without mirroring, children are denied crucial information both about how their minds work and about how to understand the world. Just as a secure attachment to a primary caregiver can lead to higher levels of emotional intelligence, mirroring is the root of empathy.”
Although the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study still isn’t widely known, even though it’s been around for 20 years, it and the other parts of ACEs science are providing a profound shift in our understanding about why we humans behave the way we do. ACEs science also shows that to change behavior that is unhealthy, criminal or unwanted requires a very counterintuitive approach. Instead of using practices based on blaming, shaming and punishing, as we have for centuries, incorporating policies and practices on understanding, nurturing and healing have seen remarkable results in every sector in tens of thousands of organizations (but there are millions of organizations). Schools that integrate practices based on ACEs science, sometimes called trauma-informed schools, are able to eliminate suspensions and expulsions. Hospital emergency rooms see a 30% drop in visits. Suicide attempts by youth drop 98%. Recidivism rates by graduates of batterer intervention courses drop from 60% to 1%. A year after families participate in Safe Babies Courts, 99% of children suffer no further abuse.
The ACE Study found that the higher someone’s ACE score—the more types of childhood adversity a person experienced—the higher their risk of adverse social, economic, health and civic consequences. The study found that most people (64%) have at least one ACE; 12% of the population has an ACE score of 4 or higher. Having an ACE score of 4 nearly doubles the risk of heart disease and cancer. It increases the likelihood of becoming an alcoholic by 700 percent and the risk of attempted suicide by 1200 percent. It increases obesity, violence, and mental illness. Forty-three U.S. states, many countries and countless organizations have done their own ACE surveys, and the results are remarkably similar. (To calculate your ACE and resilience scores, go to: Got Your ACE/Resilience Score?)
Subsequent research links ACEs to Alzheimer’s, dementia, maternal ACEs and infant development, obesity in youth, gynecology patients with chronic pelvic pain….you name the disease or condition, and it’s likely to be exacerbated by ACEs.
By applying this rough, but insightful, way to assess the risk of childhood adversity, and based on the information in Mary Trump’s book, Donald Trump’s ACE score is a 6.
- Trump’s father emotionally neglected his son when he was a baby and a toddler.
- When Donald Trump was older, his father was emotionally abusive.
- Trump’s mother emotionally neglected her son when he was a toddler, at a formative time for his brain development. In other words, he didn’t receive the positive experiences necessary for healthy development.
- Trump watched his older brother be abused by his father for years.
- Trump’s mother had mental health problems that seem to have gone undiagnosed and untreated for several years.
- Trump’s parents were in a relationship that was emotionally neglectful.
Mary Trump chronicles the lives of three generations of Trumps in her book, and shows how trauma is passed from generation to generation. The Trump family considered their lives to be normal. They probably never gave a thought to how their behavior was shaped by what they experienced as children. When people—a few hundred thousand by now—with similar backgrounds have learned about ACEs science, a constant refrain is: “I didn’t know that what I experienced was abuse. I thought it was normal. This explains my life. Why did it take so long for me to hear about this?”
The participants in the ACE Study were 17,000 mostly white, middle- and upper-middle class, college-educated people with jobs and great health care. Looking at Donald Trump’s ACEs is a potent reminder that ACEs apply to people of all economic classes, something to which the ACEs movement and research hasn’t paid much attention lately because people of color and low economics bear the burden of ACEs.
We know that the phrase “hurt people hurt people” emerged from the understanding that most people who’ve committed violent crimes have high ACE scores.
However, hurt people hurt people on many levels, including enacting policies and laws that are just as harmful as interpersonal violence, and often more harmful because they affect hundreds or thousands or millions of people.
People with high ACE scores go in one of two general directions: They see the world as a place of suffering that needs healing, encourage people to work together to solve problems, and believe that the world works better without conflict than with it. Generally speaking, their positive childhood experiences have mitigated the adversity they experienced.
Or they see the world as a dark and dangerous place where carnage is rampant, problems are everywhere and are best solved by identifying and defeating enemies, building walls, and cutting off communication from people identified as “other.” And if enemies do not present themselves, they who see the world as a dangerous place will create enemies and make them larger than they really are, so that their “defeat” empowers them to find more enemies to conquer. Generally speaking, people in this group haven’t had enough protective factors in their lives, and thus favor punitive approaches to changing behavior, such as harsh prison sentences or zero-tolerance schools, even with ample evidence that they don’t work.
People who have high ACE scores and experienced few protective factors in their childhood can heal and change—ACEs aren’t destiny—but it often requires years of effort and constant reinforcement to at least ameliorate what’s been hard-wired into a baby’s brain. Mary Trump believes that her uncle Donald is very likely never to heal. She writes:
“Donald continues to exist in the dark space between the fear of indifference and the fear of failure that led to his brother’s [Fred’s] destruction. It took forty-two years for the destruction to be completed, but the foundations were laid early and played out before Donald’s eyes as he was experiencing his own trauma. The combination of those two things—what he witnessed and what he experienced—both isolated him and terrified him. The role that fear played in his childhood and the role it plays now can’t be overstated. And the fact that fear continues to be an overriding emotion for him speaks to the hell that must have existed inside the House [the Trump family home] six decades ago.
“Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous (the implication being that he made them so), you have to remember that the man speaking is still, in essential ways, the same little boy who is desperately worried that he, like his older brother, is inadequate and that he, too, will be destroyed for his inadequacy.”
I don’t hate Donald Trump. I’m very sad for the things he experienced—no child should go through what happened to him. However, I hate many of the things he’s done. Authorizing ripping children out of the arms of their parents and separating them for months, years or forever, for example, sets me to writhing in helpless fury, and I wonder: Did the experience of having his mother ripped from his life so suddenly and for so long cause him such pain that it snuffed out the light of his empathy? Mary Trump thinks so.
For those of you who don’t like him, I’m not saying you have to feel sorry for him. I’m saying: You must understand him. You must understand him so that we don’t create more Donald Trumps in this world.
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