August 11, 2016 – Childhood Insult

Anchor lead: Can you overcome a stressful childhood with regard to your own stress response? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Stressful childhood experiences ranging from parental divorce, alcoholism or depression to bullying, have been shown to hard wire a heightened stress response with consequent increased susceptibility to disease in adults, research highlighted by Donna Jackson-Nakazawa at a recent Johns Hopkins symposium shows.  Yet all is not lost, Jackson-Nakazawa says.

Jackson-Nakazawa: How can we help individuals who’ve had trauma re-regulate the stress response? Some of the most exciting areas of research include mindfulness meditation, mindfulness-based stress reduction, neurofeedback, types of therapies that are meant  to de-charge early memories and emotions ,and there are a number of other practices and approaches that are showing this shift can be corrected.  :28

Jackson-Nakazawa is the author of a book on this issue entitled Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.