Last week I posted an article about the Harvard study on happiness, which found that strong social connections are the primary driver of happiness. No surprise there. What struck me, however, is how these findings relate to ACEs. I had just finished reading Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship, which addresses this very issue. From the back cover:

“Although it may seem that people suffer from an endless number of emotional problems and challenges, Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre maintain that most of these can be traced to five biologically based organizing principles: the need for connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love-sexuality. They describe how early trauma impairs the capacity for connection to self and others and how the ensuing diminished aliveness is the hidden dimension that underlies most psychological and many physiological problems.” [Bold and italics mine]

I can’t help but wonder if it is this impaired capacity for relationship and connection that is, perhaps, the most heartbreaking and intractable impact of childhood trauma.

This is a hopeful book, however. The authors help all of us better understand how our own coping patterns learned in childhood impede the ability to feel connection and vitality—and they give us the tools to access the impulse for “connection, health, and aliveness” that, they say, resides in us all.