Читать книгу My Grandmother's Hands - Resmaa Menakem - Страница 17
ОглавлениеBODY TO BODY, GENERATION TO GENERATION
“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.”
CICERO
“No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”
MAYA ANGELOU
Most of us think of trauma as something that occurs in an individual body, like a toothache or a broken arm. But trauma also routinely spreads between bodies, like a contagious disease. When someone with unhealed trauma chooses dirty pain over clean pain, the person may try to soothe his or her trauma by blowing it through another person—using violence, rage, coercion, deception, betrayal, or emotional abuse. This never heals the trauma. Instead, it increases the first person’s dirty pain by reinforcing harmful and aggressive survival strategies as standard operating procedure. It creates a sense of ongoing unease in the first person’s body that he or she then must override. It may also provoke a reflexively defensive or aggressive response in the second person’s body.
Sometimes people inflict this pain on others deliberately, but more often it occurs spontaneously and unexpectedly. Something triggers a person’s trauma; his or her lizard brain instantly launches a fight response; and the person physically or emotionally harms whomever is nearby.
Even as people in these situations inflict harm on others, their reasoning brains may think, What the hell am I doing? I don’t want to hurt this person! More likely, though, their conscious minds make up after-the-fact self-protective rationales: She was reaching toward her purse; there could have been a gun inside. Or, I told him to settle down, but he still acted upset; I felt he might attack me at any moment.
When therapists work with couples in crisis, we often discover that at least one partner has unhealed trauma. We also commonly find that the partnership is configured so that the trauma gets repeatedly reenacted and, sometimes, passed back and forth between the two people. Healing the trauma becomes the first step in mending the relationship.
It’s not hard to see how trauma can spread like a contagion within couples, families, and other close relationships. What we don’t often consider is how trauma can spread from body to body in any relationship.
Trauma also spreads impersonally, of course, and has done so throughout human history. Whenever one group oppresses, victimizes, brutalizes, or marginalizes another, many of the victimized people may suffer trauma, and then pass on that trauma response to their children as standard operating procedure.13 Children are highly susceptible to this because their young nervous systems are easily overwhelmed by things that older, more experienced nervous systems are able to override. As we have seen, the result is a soul wound or intergenerational trauma. When the trauma continues for generation after generation, it is called historical trauma. Historical trauma has been likened to a bomb going off, over and over again.
When one settled body encounters another, this can create a deeper settling of both bodies. But when one unsettled body encounters another, the unsettledness tends to compound in both bodies. In large groups, this compounding effect can turn a peaceful crowd into an angry mob. The same thing happens in families, especially when multiple family members face painful or stressful situations together. It can also occur more subtly over time, when one person repeatedly passes on their unsettledness to another. In her book Everyday Narcissism, therapist Nancy Van Dyken calls this hazy trauma: trauma that can’t be traced back to a single specific event.
Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality. Over even longer periods of time, as it is passed on and gets compounded through other bodies in a household, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture.
But it isn’t culture. It’s a traumatic retention that has lost its context over time. Though without context, it has not lost its power. Traumatic retentions can have a profound effect on what we do, think, feel, believe, experience, and find meaningful. (We’ll look at some examples shortly.)
What we call out as individual personality flaws, dysfunctional family dynamics, or twisted cultural norms are sometimes manifestations of historical trauma. These traumatic retentions may have served a purpose at one time—provided protection, supported resilience, inspired hope, etc.—but generations later, when adaptations continue to be acted out in situations where they are no longer necessary or helpful, they get defined as dysfunctional behavior on the individual, family, or cultural level.
The transference of trauma isn’t just about how human beings treat each other. Trauma can also be inherited genetically. Recent work in genetics has revealed that trauma can change the expression of the DNA in our cells, and these changes can be passed from parent to child.14
And it gets weirder. We now have evidence that memories connected to painful events also get passed down from parent to child—and to that child’s child. What’s more, these experiences appear to be held, passed on, and inherited in the body, not just in the thinking brain.15 Often people experience this as a persistent sense of imminent doom—the trauma ghosting I wrote about earlier.
We are only beginning to understand how these processes work, and there are a lot of details we don’t know yet. Having said that, here is what we do know so far:
• A fetus growing inside the womb of a traumatized mother may inherit some of that trauma in its DNA expression. This results in the repeated release of stress hormones, which may affect the nervous system of the developing fetus.
• A man with unhealed trauma in his body may produce sperm with altered DNA expression. These in turn may inhibit the healthy functioning of cells in his children.
• Trauma can alter the DNA expression of a child or grandchild’s brain, causing a wide range of health and mental health issues, including memory loss, chronic anxiety, muscle weakness, and depression.
• Some of these effects seem particularly prevalent among African Americans, Jews, and American Indians, three groups who have experienced an enormous amount of historical trauma.
Some scientists theorize this genetic alteration may be a way to protect later generations. Essentially, genetic changes train our descendants’ bodies through heredity rather than behavior. This suggests that what we call genetic defects may actually be ways to increase our descendants’ odds of survival in a potentially dangerous environment, by relaying hormonal information to the fetus in the womb.
The womb is itself an environment: a watery world of sounds, movement, and human biochemicals. Recent research suggests that, during the last trimester of pregnancy, fetuses in the womb can learn and remember just as well as newborns.16 Part of what they may learn, based on what their mothers go through during pregnancy, is whether the world outside the womb is safe and healthy or dangerous and toxic.
If the fetus’s mother is relatively happy and healthy during her pregnancy, and if she has a nervous system that is settled, her body will produce few stress hormones. As a result, by the time the fetus begins journeying down the birth canal, his or her body may have learned that the world is a generally safe and settled place to be.
But if the fetus’s mom experiences trauma, or if her earlier trauma causes a variety of stress hormones to regularly get released into her body, her baby may begin life outside the womb with less of a sense of safety, resilience, and coherence.
Zoë Carpenter sums this up in a simple, stark observation:
Health experts now think that stress throughout the span of a woman’s life can prompt biological changes that affect the health of her future children. Stress can disrupt immune, vascular, metabolic, and endocrine systems, and cause cells to age more quickly.17
All of this suggests that one of the best things each of us can do—not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren—is to metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants, via healthy DNA expression. In contrast, when we don’t address our trauma, we may pass it on to future generations, along with some of our fear, constriction, and dirty pain.
Trauma hurts. It can fill us with reflexive fear, anxiety, depression, and shame. It can cause us to fly off the handle; to reflexively retreat and disappear; to do things that don’t make sense, even to ourselves; or, sometimes, to harm others or ourselves.
One of my mentors, Dr. Noel Larson, used to say, “If something is hysterical, then it is usually historical.” If your (or anyone’s) reaction to a current situation has more (or far less) energy than it normally would, then it likely involves energy from ancient historical trauma that has lost its context. In the present, your body is experiencing unmetabolized trauma from the past.
The same may be true if you respond with an uncharacteristically low amount of energy—for example, if you react to the news of a good friend’s death with a brief, flat “That’s too bad.” In this case, the ancient historical trauma has triggered a freeze response—what therapists call dissociation—rather than a fight or flight reaction.18 In either case, this trauma may have been passed down to you through your parents’ or other ancestors’ actions, through their DNA, or through both.
Sometimes the body couples and compounds this trauma with the energy of other traumatic events. This can cause people to suddenly and completely (though usually temporarily) lose their cool without having any idea why. Remember, to the traumatized body, all threats—current or ancient, individual or collective, real or imagined—are exactly the same. The lizard brain senses danger and commands the body to fight, flee, or freeze.
Trauma is unique to each body. What one person experiences as trauma, another may experience as nothing more than a big challenge. I’ve had clients who were beaten, raped, or deeply betrayed, yet who metabolized their pain and healed. I’ve had others who were traumatized by loud noises or the affection of unfamiliar, overeager dogs.
That said, most people experience trauma if an experience they have:
• Is unexpected (for example, the 2007 collapse of the 35W highway bridge in Minneapolis).
• Involves the death of many people, especially children (for example, the Tulsa race riot of 1921).
• Lasts a long time or repeats itself multiple times (such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath).
• Has unknown causes (for instance, when your partner suddenly and mysteriously disappears).
• Is deeply poignant or meaningful (such as the killing of twenty-seven people—twenty of whom were children between the ages of six and seven—at Sandy Hook Elementary School).
• Impacts a large area and/or many people (for example, an earthquake, a plague, a terrorist attack, persecution, or enslavement).
These are the effects of trauma involving specific incidents. But what about the effects of repetitive trauma: unhealed traumas that accumulate over time? The research is now in: the effects on the body from trauma that is persistent (or pervasive, repetitive, or long-held) are significantly negative, sometimes profoundly so. While many studies support this conclusion,19 the largest and best known is the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES), a large study of 17,000 people20 conducted over three decades by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the healthcare conglomerate Kaiser Permanente. Published in 2014, ACES clearly links childhood trauma (and other “adverse childhood events” involving abuse or neglect21) to a wide range of long-term health and social consequences, including illness, disability, social problems, and early death—all of which can get passed down through the generations. The ACE study also demonstrates a strong link between the number of “adverse childhood events” and increased rates of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, chronic lung disease, alcoholism, depression, liver disease, and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as illicit drug use, financial stress, poor academic and work performance, pregnancy in adolescence, and attempted suicide. People who have experienced four or more “adverse events” as children are twice as likely to develop heart disease than people who have experienced none. They are also twice as likely to develop autoimmune diseases, four and a half times as likely to be depressed, ten times as likely to be intravenous drug users, and twelve times as likely to be suicidal. As children, they are thirty-three times as likely to have learning and behavior problems in school.
Pediatrician Nadine Burke-Harris offers the following apt comparison: “If a child is exposed to lead while their brain is developing, it affects the long-term development of their brain . . . It’s the same way when a child is exposed to high doses of stress and trauma while their brain is developing . . . Exposure to trauma is particularly toxic for children.” In other words, there is a biochemical component behind all this.
When people experience repeated trauma, abuse, or high levels of stress for long stretches of time, a variety of stress hormones get secreted into their bloodstreams. In the short term, the purpose of these chemicals is to protect their bodies. But when the levels of these chemicals22 remain high over time, they can have toxic effects, making a person less healthy, less resilient, and more prone to illness. High levels of one or more of these chemicals can also crowd out other, healthier chemicals—those that encourage trust, intimacy, motivation, and meaning.
All of this suggests that trauma is a major contributor to many of our bodily, mental, and social ills, and that mending our trauma may be one of the most effective ways to address those ills.
The results of the ACE study are dramatic. Yet it covered only fifteen years. How much more dramatic might the results be for people who have experienced (or whose ancestors experienced) centuries of enslavement or genocide?23
Historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, institutionalized trauma (such as white-body supremacy, gender discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination, etc.), and personal trauma (including any trauma we inherit from our families genetically, or through the way they treat us, or both) often interact. As these traumas compound each other, or as each new or recent traumatic experience triggers the energy of older experiences, they can create ever-increasing damage to human lives and human bodies.
Figure 1. How Trauma Compounds
(Based partly on a figure used in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.)
So far, we’ve looked at trauma that happens to us. But there are other kinds of trauma that are even more common: trauma from watching or experiencing someone else get traumatized. Witnesses to murder, rape, torture, and other acts of physical violence often have their own trauma responses. They may help the victim, or fight the perpetrator, or flee the scene, or freeze in place. Someone who witnesses a flood, a fire, a terrorist attack, an armed robbery, or someone’s public humiliation may respond similarly. These types of trauma are called secondary trauma or vicarious trauma. Almost every human being holds some of this trauma in his or her body.
A particularly poisonous form of secondary trauma involves not only witnessing the harming of another human being, but inflicting that harm. Often, the perpetrator tries to avoid this trauma by dissociating (a form of flight) during the event, and then, immediately afterward, overriding any impulse to process the trauma or discharge its energy from his or her body. Such attempts to flee from trauma only deepen it—and create an extreme form of dirty pain. Because the perpetrator knows he or she has committed a moral transgression, his or her actions also create profound shame. Therapists call this a moral injury.
In their work, many police officers experience moral injury or have witnessed it in their coworkers. Unfortunately, very few manage to metabolize this shame and trauma; few are even aware of it, let alone of what they need to do to metabolize it; and still fewer receive encouragement or support from their coworkers, superiors, or organizational structures.
What do you think happens when a police officer who recently experienced a moral injury returns to duty with the unhealed trauma still stuck in his or her body? How might this affect his or her job performance? His or her family? His or her health? The people in the community or neighborhood he or she serves?
It’s easy to see how white-body supremacy has created soul wounds for many millions of African American bodies over the past three centuries. It’s less obvious what the inflicting of that trauma has done to white bodies.
When I lead workshops on trauma for people in service professions, I often show them a clip from 12 Years a Slave, the film based on the memoir of Solomon Northrup, a free African American from upstate New York who was kidnapped and sold into enslavement in 1853. In the clip, we see slave trader Theophilus Freeman (played by Paul Giamatti) coldly check the health, strength, and muscle tone of his human merchandise. As buyers come by to make purchases, Freeman orders one young African man to run and jump in place for a potential customer. Freeman tells the customer, “You see how fit the boy is. Like ripe fruit. He will grow into a fine beast.”
In the same scene, Eliza, a young Black mother, pleads with Freeman to have mercy and not separate her from her daughter. William Ford, a white customer and plantation owner, is moved by her pleas. He asks Freeman, “For God’s sake, are you not sentimental in the least?” Freeman ignores them both, breaks up the family, and says to Ford, “My sentimentality stretches the length of a coin.”
Also in that scene, Freeman commands Northrup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) to stand and approach him. When Northrup doesn’t respond, Freeman slaps him hard—and loudly—across the face. The clip ends here.
At that point I turn to my audience and say, “Now I want to ask you a few questions.” I pause, letting the participants imagine what I am about to ask. Then I say, “What do you think is going on inside the slave trader’s body? Do you think he experiences settling, relaxation, and resilience? Or do you think he experiences constriction and discomfort?”
I continue, “And what do you think is happening in the bodies of the other white folks in the room? Do you think they’re relaxed and settled? What do you imagine a white body has to do in order to be settled in that situation? What got passed down to those white bodies for them to tolerate that level of cultural brutality? What happened to those bodies in the past that causes them to not react when they watch other people being traumatized? Where in their bodies do you think some of these white people might be experiencing constriction?”
After another pause, “Why is William Ford the only person who speaks up on behalf of any of the Black bodies? What do you think is stopping the white bodies from doing something to help?”
Finally, “What are you experiencing right now in your body?”
Now ask yourself this same question. Notice what your own body wants to do. Take notice of whatever sensations and thoughts arise. Notice if you want to fight, or run, or freeze in place. Just notice.
Now I’d like you to explore how intergenerational trauma may have affected your life and body. You can do this by reflecting briefly on four events in the lives of your ancestors.
Find a quiet, comfortable place where you can be alone and undistracted for at least fifteen minutes. Now consider these questions.
1. When did your ancestors settle in America?24 Did they come here voluntarily, or were they refugees, servants, or enslaved people? Were they fleeing brutality, oppression, plague, war, or poverty? Did they come here in search of a better life? How old were they? How healthy were they? Was there a community or a group of relatives here to welcome and assist them?
Did your ancestors speak English when they got here? What other language or languages did they speak? What possessions and skills did they bring with them? To the best of your knowledge, were they hopeful or desperate? Prosperous or poor?
As far as you know, did any of your ancestors ever talk about the Native people who arrived on this continent many centuries earlier? If so, what did they say?
If you are an immigrant to America yourself, please respond to this question by reflecting on your own experience.
2. What traumatic events directly affected your mother? Your father? How did each event affect them at the time? How did it affect the choices they made later? How did it affect the way they raised you?
3. What traumatic events directly affected your grandparents? How did each event affect them at the time? How did it affect the choices they made later? How did it affect the way they raised your father or mother?
4. When your mother was pregnant with you, was the pregnancy easy or difficult for her? Was she generally healthy or ill? Happy or unhappy? Hopeful or unhopeful? What challenges did she face during her pregnancy? What else was going on for her and the family?
Besides trauma, there is something else human beings routinely pass on from person to person and from generation to generation: resilience.25 Resilience is built into the very cells of our bodies. It is as much a part of us as our ability to heal. Like trauma, resilience can ripple outward, changing the lives of people, families, neighborhoods, and communities in positive ways.
However, resilience is often misunderstood. It is typically viewed as the ability to bounce back from adversity, often in a heroic, individualized act. Furthermore, that ability is often seen as something learned or acquired in childhood—the result of supportive parenting, the presence of other caring adults, and so on. But the full picture of resilience is much broader and much more organic.
First, resilience is both intrinsic and learned, a combination of nature (what you’re born with) and nurture (the circumstances you encounter, especially as you grow up). Second, resilience manifests both individually and collectively. Sometimes it does take the form of a personal, individual act. Often, however, resilience is expressed communally by a group, a family, an organization, or a culture.
Suppose you’re running a marathon. Halfway through, exhausted, you trip and fall. Your legs ache and you’re bleeding from both knees. You pull yourself to your feet and decide it’s time to quit the race. Then five of your friends and family members show up beside you. “You can do it!” they shout. “You finished last year; you can finish this time. Go for it!” Next thing you know, you’re off and running again.
Clearly this required resilience. But the resilience wasn’t just inside of you. It also came from the words and actions of people who care for you, and from your relationship with them. Ann Masten, one of the leading researchers on resilience in children, expresses it this way: “I like to say that the resilience of a child is distributed. It’s not just in the child. It’s distributed in their relationships with the many other people who make up their world.”26
Third, resilience isn’t just about responding to—or getting through—a difficult experience. Resilience also manifests in a form that’s more about being than doing. This aspect of resilience helps us stay grounded and settled, no matter what happens to us. It enables us to sustain and protect ourselves—and each other—over time. It’s a way for our body to access possibility and coherence, regardless of the circumstances. It’s not so much a response as it is a way of showing up, a way of tapping into the energies that surround and move through everything in our world.
Resilience can be built and strengthened, both individually and collectively. We African Americans took pains to build resilience in ourselves and our children for many generations; if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have survived. For 400 years, with many successes and many failures, we have sought to counter new and old trauma with both the resilience we were born with and the resilience we grew and taught each other to grow.
I often tell people that resilience is not a thing or an attribute, but a flow. It moves through the body, and between multiple bodies when they are harmonized. It is neither built nor developed; it is taken in and expressed as part of a larger relationship with a family, a group, a community, or the world at large.
Notice how this takes place not just in the cognitive mind, but in the body, and in the minds and bodies of others, and in the collective body of people who care about us.
Here are some especially good pieces of news about resilience: recent findings in neuroscience reveal that the human brain always has the capacity to learn, change, and grow. It is genetically designed to mend itself. While trauma can inhibit or block this capacity, that effect is not permanent; once the trauma has ceased and been addressed, growth and positive change become possible once again.27 Later chapters will offer a variety of activities to help your brain and body heal.
One morning, as my mother and I were taking a long walk together, she said to me, “Resmaa, you’ve written about my mother’s hands, but you haven’t said a word about her feet.” My grandmother had feet that were small and thick, like hobbit feet, but I’d never thought much about them. She liked to take her shoes off and put her feet up, but that had seemed completely normal to me, especially for an older person.
“What’s special about her feet?” I asked.
My mother paused, then looked at me. “You don’t know, do you?”
I shook my head.
“You know those hands of hers—her thick fingers covered with calluses? Her feet were the same way. What, you think she had shoes to wear when she was little? When she was four years old, she was out in the fields, barefoot, picking cotton. The fields were full of thorns, and they cut her feet up, day after day, until she grew calluses all over them, just like on her hands.”
Over generations, many of us African Americans have developed thick emotional skins in a variety of ways.28 This has served us well, protecting us from a great deal of damage and pain in a dangerous world. This is how resilience works. It doesn’t always create full healing, but it may build protection and prevent (or blunt) future wounding. It can create in the body a little more room for growth and development. This, in turn, can create an opportunity for passing on caring, context, and growth to other bodies—especially the bodies of the next generation.
—BODY AND BREATH PRACTICE—
Go to a quiet, comfortable place where you can be alone for about ten minutes. Sit down and take a few deep, slow breaths. Feel free to either close your eyes or leave them open.
You are about to invite the presence of an ancestor. You don’t know who this will be. You also don’t know how he or she will appear—as an image, a memory, a sensation in your body, an emotion, or a flow of energy. All you know is that this person lived at least three generations before you and died before you were born. They might be a great-grandparent or an ancestor from the distant past. You do not get to choose who this person will be; he or she will choose you.
Just sit quietly, following your breathing, and invite this unknown person into your presence.
Don’t plan to converse or interact with this ancestor. Don’t try to identify or figure out anything about him or her. Simply observe this person’s presence and notice how your body responds.
If your ancestor doesn’t appear quickly, that’s fine. Just continue sitting and breathing. Give the person up to five minutes to make an appearance.
If he or she appears as an image, what does he or she look like? Is the person female or male? How old does he or she appear to be? What is he or she wearing? What expression is on his or her face?
Does your ancestor seem safe and settled? Happy? Fearful? Distressed? If your ancestor is moving, what is he or she doing? Is the person alone, or with a companion?
Whether your ancestor appears in an image or in some other form, how does your body experience his or her presence? Does it feel comforted? Welcomed? Loved? Relaxed? Wary? Afraid? Constricted? Does it want to move toward or away from your ancestor? Does your body want to touch or hold the person, or push him or her away?
When you are ready, thank your ancestor for visiting you. Then get up and continue with your day.
If, at any time, your ancestor’s presence feels threatening, gently but firmly send him or her away. Then take a few slow, deep breaths to return yourself to the here and now. Orient yourself to the room by slowly looking around, especially behind you. If you still feel an uncomfortable presence, leave the room.
RE-MEMBERINGS
• Trauma can spread from one body to another, like a contagious disease—through families and from generation to generation.
• When someone with unhealed trauma chooses dirty pain over clean pain, he or she may try to push his or her trauma through another human being, by using violence, rage, coercion, betrayal, or emotional abuse. This only increases the dirty pain, while often creating trauma in the other person as well.
• When one settled body encounters another, there can be a deeper settling of both bodies. But when one unsettled body encounters another, the unsettledness tends to compound in both bodies. In families and large groups, this effect can multiply exponentially.
• Over months or years, unhealed trauma can become part of someone’s personality. As it is passed on and compounded through other bodies, it often becomes the family norm. If it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can turn into culture.
• Trauma can damage the genes in our cells. That damage can be passed on from parent to child, and from the child to his or her own child.
• One of the best things each of us can do for ourselves, and for our descendants, is metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal, we may spread our emotional health and healthy genes to later generations.
• Trauma and other adverse childhood events are associated with a wide range of illnesses, disabilities, social problems, and early death. All of these can also get passed down through the generations.
• Secondary trauma or vicarious trauma involves watching someone else be traumatized (and, sometimes, giving aid to them). An especially poisonous form of secondary trauma can occur when a person not only witnesses another person being harmed, but also inflicts that harm.
• Resilience is built into the cells of our bodies. Like trauma, resilience can ripple outward, changing the lives of people, families, neighborhoods, and communities in positive ways. Also like trauma, resilience can be passed down from generation to generation.
• The human brain always retains the capacity to learn, change, and grow. While trauma can inhibit or block this capacity, once the trauma has been addressed, growth and positive change become possible again.
13 Over time, roles can switch and the oppressed may become the oppressors. They then pass on trauma not only to their children, but also to a new group of victims.
14 This research has led to the creation of a new field of scientific inquiry known as epigenetics, the study of inheritable changes in gene expression. Epigenetics has transformed the way scientists think about genomes. The first study to clearly show that stress can cause inheritable gene defects in humans was published in 2015 by Rachel Yehuda and her colleagues, titled “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects n FKBP5 Methylation” (Biological Psychiatry 80, no. 5, September, 2016: 372–80). (Earlier studies identified the same effect in animals.) Yehuda’s study demonstrated that damaged genes in the bodies of Jewish Holocaust survivors—the result of the trauma they suffered under Nazism—were passed on to their children. Later research confirms Yehuda’s conclusions.
15 A landmark study demonstrating this effect in mice was published in 2014 by Kerry Ressler and Brian Dias (“Parental Olfactory Experience Influences Behavior and Neural Structure in Subsequent Generations,” Nature Neuroscience 17: 89–96). Ressler and Dias put male mice in a small chamber, then occasionally exposed them to the scent of acetophenone (which smells like cherries)—and, simultaneously, to small electric shocks. Eventually the mice associated the scent with pain; they would shudder whenever they were exposed to the smell, even after the shocks were discontinued. The children of those mice were born with a fear of the smell of acetophenone. So were their grandchildren. As of this writing, no one has completed a similar study on humans, both for ethical reasons and because we take a lot longer than mice to produce a new generation.
16 A good, if very brief, overview of these studies appeared in Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/08/babies-learn-recognize-words-womb.
17 This quote is from an eye-opening article in The Nation, “What’s Killing America’s Black Infants?”: https://www.thenation.com/article/whats-killing-americas-black-infants. Carpenter also notes that in the United States, Black infants die at a rate that’s over twice as high as for white infants. In some cities, the disparity is much worse: in Washington, DC, the infant mortality rate in Ward 8, which is over 93 percent Black, is ten times the rate in Ward 3, which is well-to-do and mostly white.
18 There are other possible causes, of course. Similar low-energy responses are common among people with depression, dysthymia, bipolar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, or antisocial personality disorder (i.e., sociopaths).
19 See, for example: “Early Trauma and Inflammation” (Psychosomatic Medicine 74, no. 2, February/March 2012: 146–52); “Chronic Stress, Glucocorticoid Receptor Resistance, Inflammation, and Disease Risk” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 16, April 17, 2012: 5995–99); and “Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Risk Factors for Age-Related Disease: Depression, Inflammation, and Clustering of Metabolic Risk Markers” (Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 163, no. 12, December 2009: 1135–43).
20 Of the people studied, 74.8 percent were white; 4.5 percent were African American; 54 percent were female; and 46 percent were male.
21 The ten “adverse childhood events” are divorced or separated parents; physical abuse; physical neglect; emotional abuse; emotional neglect; sexual abuse; domestic violence that the child witnessed; substance abuse in the household; mental illness in the household; and a family member in prison.
22 These chemicals are cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine. They are secreted by the adrenal gland.
