What if the Problem is actually the Solution

A guest post edited and curated by Molly Weingrod, LSW from Autonomic Compass: Finding Home in Your Nervous System

I have studied, and been personally and professionally involved in the transformation of trauma for the past twenty years, yet I am increasingly uncomfortable with this ambiguous word, and increasingly aware that what it means in the culture at large, and what it means to me as someone working in the field of trauma transformation, are different. I would like to frame a conversation around trauma that feels more practically useful.

In 1998, Vincent Felitti MD conducted the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES) at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego. The study, which grew to include 17,337 adult patients at a private pay health insurer, would demonstrate that 67% of a college-educated population had one or more ACES. The study demonstrated a graded dose-response relationship between early adversity and adverse health outcomes later in life. In plain language, the more early adversity you have of whatever kind, if this is not treated at its roots, the worse your health will be over your entire lifespan. These lifespan health outcomes, evident 50 years after the inciting events, span physical health impacts, mental health impacts, and substance abuse. A person with 4 or more ACES is up to 12X more likely to develop anxiety, depression, suicidality, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and lung disease, or to struggle with alcohol and drug abuse.

While Felitti’s study brought to the mainstream population an awareness of the prevalence of early adversity– the enduring impacts from growing up with abuse and neglect and the reality that at least two-thirds of the adult population was experiencing the adverse health outcomes resulting from it– the study failed to acknowledge many categories of adversity the inclusion of which would have substantively broadened our sense of who is suffering traumatic impacts. Broadly, the study failed to conceive of ACES resulting from sociological phenomena (sexism, racism, homophobia, religious persecution, etc.), as well as not accounting for ACES resulting from alienation from the Living World. The inclusion of these two broad categories (social and ecological ACES) would have brought the modern population’s exposure to trauma up to 100%.

Furthermore, it was beyond Felitti’s purview to describe the mechanisms of trauma. Events were traumatizing to people as evidenced by the degree to which they compromised health outcomes later in life, across physical and mental health domains, but articulating the neurobiological mechanisms of trauma was outside of the study’s scope.

What Felitti did note, and which in itself is a stunning realization, was that simply creating a context where a patient could talk about early adversity with their physician (in the wake of the administration of the screening, the patient would be informed that they had an ACES score and invited to share anything with their doctor that they thought could help the physician better treat them), had a profoundly positive effect on people’s health. Simply acknowledging early adversity, in the presence of a non-judgmental health professional, was profoundly alleviating to symptoms. The potency of this observation is enormous, because what it means is that allowing the conscious mind (ordinary sense of self ) to acknowledge what the body knows (as opposed to keeping this knowledge sequestered outside of conscious awareness) is transformational.

Read on to discover the profound implications of this observation…