Often, people who have a history of trauma in childhood find themselves struggling to flourish in adulthood. Trauma affects the brain in ways that can make you more likely to experience difficulty when faced with emotionally stressful and demanding situations in your relationships, at work, and as a parent. Throughout my life, both growing up and as an adult, I’ve faced a number of challenging life experiences, stressors, and traumas, and I understand this struggle on a deep, intrinsic...

Many people with #ACE’s (Adverse Childhood Experiences) are finding that the early #trauma and sense of unsafety they endured growing up are being re-triggered during these fear-laden times, amidst the #Covid #pandemic, political upheaval, and feeling isolated. Stress and uncertainty can trigger old, sticky feelings of fear, anxiety, or loss from long ago and bring up new, painful negative thoughts and physical symptoms. This can be true even when we’ve worked really hard to resolve our...

When I sat down in my attic to write THE ANGEL AND THE ASSASSIN: The Tiny Brain Cell that Changed the Course of Medicine , I never imagined that it would be so needed in our world! 2020 has been chock-full of adversity, uncertainty and distress on so many levels: the worst pandemic in a hundred years, millions facing economic uncertainty, global climate change, and mounting political discord. The past decade has been a golden era in brain research, one in which scientists have offered...

I hope you are well and wish you the very best for 2021! These are certainly stressful times for us all. Some of you may already know that I’ve just launched a new online program to help ameliorate the heightened stress and trauma so many are feeling. Your Healing Narrative: Write-to-Heal With Neural Re-Narrating is specifically designed to help harness the power of the brain and nervous system for calm, peace and possibility, even in the face of adversity. You can learn more in this blog...

Happy 2021! 2020 was a year unlike any other. But it also brought home for many of us what matters most, including the importance of nurturing and harnessing the power of our nervous system and brain toward equanimity so that we can flourish even in the face of adversity. Your Healing Narrative: Write-to-Heal With Neural Re-Narrating i s my 2021 offering for individuals, parents, teachers, social workers, therapists, and health care professionals, to help ease a little bit of the anxiety,...

More than a decade ago, I was diagnosed with several autoimmune diseases, one after another, including Guillain-Barré syndrome , which left me paralyzed twice while raising two young children. All told I spent six years in and out of bed and hospitals, learning, between crises, to use a cane or walker to navigate life as a working-mother-with-chronic-illness. My immune system was repeatedly and mistakenly attacking my body, causing the nerves in my arms, legs, and those I needed to swallow...

Okay! So, after getting YOUR answers to my crowdsourcing question (thank you for the 100 responses on Facebook and Instagram !): "What do you want to see from me on social media?" the overwhelming #1 response was more nuggets of science, offered with the shared sense that I understand YOUR struggles, I see your suffering. And I do. Oh, you have no idea how much I do. So, with that in mind, here's a nugget of science about How Genes Respond to Trauma and Stress . Some genes, like the ones...

A very short video about how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) affect adult illness such as heart disease, autoimmune disease and cancer, and why I wrote Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, And How You Can Heal .

This is Part Two of my Female Adversity: The Female Body and Brain on Toxic Stress series. (CRUCIAL NOTE HERE BEFORE YOU READ: Boys’ immune systems become dysregulated in response to #toxicstress too, and that leads to disease and changes to the brain that we also need to talk about more openly AND compassionately. Today I’m focusing on girls’ unique immune response to #toxicstress.) So, exactly what happens in a girl’s body, in response to #toxicstress, that leads girls to be more likely to...

This blog 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. 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 intersection of neuroscience, immunology and emotion – while shining a spotlight on...

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 intersection of neuroscience, immunology and emotion – while shining a spotlight on WOMEN’s experiences. Connecting these dots is always an underlying theme in my work. Women, girls, toxic stress, the female brain and immune system, autoimmune disease and chronic physical and mental illness — if you care about any of...

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...

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...

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.

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. H ere 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, over a period of...

I wanted every individual suffering from chronic illnesses to understand the emerging science on not only how early adversity can lead to adult chronic illness, but how we can heal.

This new research on early emotional trauma, epigenetic changes, and adult physical disease breaks down longstanding barriers between what the medical community has long seen as “physical” disease versus what is “mental” or “emotional.”

Statistics tell us that two-thirds of Americans reading these words, including physicians, will recognize that experiences in their childhood still trail after them today, like small ghosts. Fortunately, medical science now recognizes many proven interventions for recovering from trauma, even decades after events have occurred.