Jeremy

You know, the functions provided by the prefrontal brain can dry up. And to Jack’s point, when does the brain curate and diminish some functions? Our brain does most of this during very early childhood. A huge amount of brain reorganizing occurs during those first two years of life. There may be serious vulnerabilities during the pre-language phase where there’s no language connected to the trauma.  As Mitch brought up, we often have a narrative, but even in the pre-narrative period, how does a person get out of that if they’ve been traumatized during those very early phases?

The other thing, Jack, that crossed my mind concerns the family description that you offered. It would end up with an ACE score of one.  If there is a severe traumatizing event, then the family architecture being so healthy will make sure it stays at one. Maybe the context of a family structure limits the likelihood of externals causing repeated trauma to the child. The protection of the child is so emphasized that the child makes it through even though there’s a war going on and things are blowing up. The family creates a sense of safety for that child that limits their ACE score. I bet that an interesting study regarding these dynamics could be done.

Jack

My hypothesis is that people who are suffering from adverse child events have had a predisposing first two years that made them susceptible to the adverse effects of ACEs. However, many people who’ve had adverse child events aren’t suffering from them. My hypothesis would likewise be that in the first two years of life, these latter people would have predisposing features that made them more resilient or more resistant to the impact of adverse child events. Now that’s a pure hypothesis, nothing except a couple of anecdotes about it, but I just think there has to be more than just adverse child events because lots of people have suffered from these events but suffer no long-term ill effects. When you talk to them, they don’t shrug these events off, but they have moved on. The adverse childhood events are not impacting their life, whereas other people are devastating. So, I can’t believe that it’s just inherent in the adverse child events. There’s got to be a co-factor in there that is also necessary.

Bill B

Gay and I taught a course together on trauma. We recognized that an event is traumatizing at least in part because you can’t act upon this event. You cannot do anything to modify your victim. I was thinking back to the notion of threat and challenge. I did a lot of work in the early 1990s in the country of Estonia. This was the period of time when the Soviet Union was collapsing. One of the observations that I wrote about in a book about freedom concerned the women in Estonia. They were handling the collapse a whole lot better than the men. It was startling. But part of the reason was that women all through the Soviet era had been agents of adjustment and change. They were the ones who went out and got the food during the entire Soviet occupation of their country. They’re the ones who made sure the family was doing all right. They were accustomed to taking action. The men, like most of us, just big bullshitters. They mostly sat around, kind of puffed up, and talked about politics. So, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, their narrative suddenly also collapsed–whether they were pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet. Life got messed up for them. I think for most of the men, it was more of a threat than a challenge. It just struck me that what the women were doing is framing their adjustments to the collapse as something of a challenge. Obviously, this is not the case for all women, nor is threat assumed by all men in Estonia and other Soviet countries. I do think, however, that many of the women were finding this is a challenge, and the men were generally finding this a threat. The men were deeply distressed and often in need for psychotherapy. I was over in Estonia with several psychologists from my graduate school. They agreed that many of these men were messed up. It’ll be interesting to see what happens here in the United State–now that we’re going through our own little mini-revolution. Who gets messed up?