This is the fourth in a series of posts on what I've learned from my dysfunctional upbringing and my thoughts on how the systems and beliefs that comprise our culture can improve. For my full story, see the December 2020 post titled, "We Are Shaped by Our Experiences: An Origin Story Pulled from the Shadows." My intention is to inspire others to develop greater awareness about their own lives and to share ideas for building healthier, more supportive families and communities. Because I believe, as Teal Swan says, "We are given the very wounds we are meant to teach others to heal."

"The Buddha said at some point...with our thoughts we create the world that we live in. But what he didn't say, which is really the insight of modern psychology, is that before 'with our thoughts and our minds we create the world,' the world creates our mind." - Dr. Gabor Maté

Let bygones be bygones is the common, shaming message surrounding childhood trauma ordered by people who never experienced nor studied it, or who themselves are in deep denial about their own history. Yet something in me that knew that the keys to really understanding myself and what I needed to heal--and help prevent from happening to others--lay buried in the past that increasingly preoccupied my mind. It turns out I was on to something. Because science now bears out that ​a person’s earliest experiences in life have the greatest impact on their physical, mental, and emotional development and well-being due to physiological factors unique to the very young. ​​

This is the second in a series of posts on what I've learned from my dysfunctional upbringing and my thoughts on how the systems and beliefs that comprise our culture can improve. For my full story, see the December 2020 post titled, "We Are Shaped by Our Experiences: An Origin Story Pulled from the Shadows." My intention is to inspire others to develop greater awareness about their own lives and to share ideas for building healthier, more supportive families and communities. Because I believe, as Teal Swan says, "We are given the very wounds we are meant to teach others to heal."

Quick: List five examples of trauma. Maybe picturing the trauma care center at your local hospital, you’ll likely name big, unforeseen events that cause severe bodily injury, like heart attacks, car accidents, gun crimes, and building fires. For much of our modern history, perhaps the least controversial definition of trauma is something like this:  an acute, physical, often violent event that surprises and harms us in the moment that it occurs.

Maybe your definition of trauma extends to events that seem to leave the body intact but shock the mind, like a soldier's experience witnessing the unbearable carnage of combat--events that are linked with an eventual cascade of behavioral problems that fall under the term post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The federal government only fairly recently accepted PTSD as a legitimate problem among its veterans of war, as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk recounts in his 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.  But as the author asserts, "One does not have to be a combat soldier...to encounter trauma" with similar long-term effects. He goes on to list statistics associated with the famous ACEs study, described below, that identified sources of trauma in the home environments of the country's youngest--and thus most vulnerable--population.