#and pick out what the maladaptive responses to those traumas are and then do the work of translating that into a set of superpowers

[ty-bayonet-betteridge]

i just HAD to say "worm life series au" and now my brain is spinning

this is gonna distract me from current ongoing fics i just KNOW IT

[ethicalarcana]

Tarot// The Fight for (inner) Justice

The energy of this card is earned by weeks, months, or years of making decisions with a particular intention. Defending yourself against competitors or societal conformity can be hard; success comes in picking the most just and winning outcome. Fairness can become a trigger after traumatic events. A supervillain's origin story usually entails political, social, or familial loss, The villain wants to make everyone pay. This is the reverse energy of Justice if you are routing for the hero or just common sense. Trauma is an event or series of events so unfavorable to the mind that it is too much to process. Complex trauma is a series of these events. The impact of trauma exists in the mind's extreme, so coping with trauma can come out in extreme ways; like self-harm, criminal behavior, compulsive lying, compulsive shopping, and eating and addictions. Abusers may craft a personality based on maladaptive coping mechanisms to trauma, like our supervillain's revenge arc.

It may be hard to tell what true Justice is but it's clear what it's not. Justice cannot be immature, it cannot be capricious, and it cannot be shallow or demonstrative. In human history, there have always been societies that prescribe the death penalty for every person who stepped out of line. A more liberal, modern attitude recognizes that this only makes people used to executions and scared to get caught acting authentically, lest it is construed as 'wrong'. Living in fear causes the mind to re-traumatize itself with thoughts of an already-lived worst nightmare. Triggers, slights, and even imagery concepts can inspire a fight, flight, freeze, or faun response. Acting out in extremes of rage, fear, condemnation or banishment are the actions of the demagogy, not the savior.

So if these irrational knee-jerk responses amount to injustice; What is justice? In a complicated world, it is harder to prescribe something that will match everyone's lifestyle values. In tarot, the seeker does not only collaborate their experience with a group of people but receives divination specific to their daily and life experience. The advice this card provides praises us for becoming aware that there is a higher morality but cautions against standing in the way of fate. The Justice energy represents natural consequences and cautions against too forceful administration of punishment. Pulling The Justice card signals that you may administer punishment and give rewards but only from your higher self. The benefits of The Justice energy come

Being able to stop short of administering mindless payback requires a change in the mind. This energy may not bring peace but the ability to raise your vibration when the eleventh card turns up in a reading requires a peaceful mind. Understanding which feelings and attitudes are authentic and which of these grow in the mind as a result of rumination can bring the blessings of Justice. Mindfulness and other mental health practices require sitting in silence. This allows a person to identify intrusive and repetitive thoughts. When a person observes those thoughts it can be surprising how many of the same ones show up again and again. Many intrusive thoughts have a shameful, fearful, or angry tinge. Continuing to sit with those feelings can cause a burning in the body. The mind-body connection becomes a battle because when the thoughts are identified in the brain, the somatic aches and discomforts. Quieting this tumult internally strengthens resolves. This resolves leaks outward. External struggles become easier to deal with after a person has silently held themselves accountable for their chaos and lack of steadiness, as this is one of the hardest things to do. Once this peace, or stalemate, is being worked on; Justice feels far less volatile. Objectivity is a hallmark of living in The Justice energy. The mind and body are held in check with the self-care and the external world is met with self-critical reserve.

Because life happens, problems must be dealt with while doing this work. As this push towards internal discipline continues a person understands that peace is the goal. Here Justice is the fight and search for peace in as many areas of consciousness as possible.

Those seeking a path to equality are grateful when things work out as they should; as so much patience has been required. Gratitude is a humble form of happiness. Like contained water, it seeks its own level. In this humble state of recognizing how much rage and instability has been overcome in one's self and within conflicts with others; happiness is not sweet but nutritious. Like hearty, well-balanced meals, a diet of gratitude is necessary for functioning in an ever-changing world. So many things are taken away from each of us. A swipe of the debit card, the fall of the political or pop icon (living or dead), a car accident that destroys property and health in an instant. Sometimes, a person may realize that they have taken another person's time energy, or money in a way disagreeable to this party. Reconciliation and compromise are often painful processes.

All of these contradictory circumstances can be resolved with a balance of practical, mental, and spiritual actions. Beginning with the practical is necessary to achieve Justice. The Supreme Court hears cases based on evidence and precedent. If the holders of this office take their job seriously, they can usher in change. Ruth Beder Ginsberg and Thurgood Marshall are examples of this in US history. Millions have been positively affected by their correct judgments. When this office becomes a stronghold of power and oppressive influence, the nation mourns the unfairness. Balance is elusive but each citizen must turn the tide in the war for Justice with reason and kindness. On a deeper level, when Justice happens as a consequence of the march of history, it takes a strong group of leaders to protect it as long as it is challenged.

[system-of-a-schizo]

Topic: My thoughts on the deliberate creation of systems. Please correct me if I'm wrong! I made this post in order to teach and learn!

Content warning: mention of RAMCOA, talk about programming and trauma responses.

I recently saw someone talk about how RAMCOA would consist of deliberately traumatizing children so that they would develop DID and be able to program alters into the system they created which gave me the idea to make this post.

With what I know, I don't believe it is possible to deliberately cause someone to develop DID or program alters into a system. I don't know everything about everything though and am usually willing to learn more. If anyone feels comfortable doing so, please tell me what I've gotten wrong.

Deliberate Creation of a System

DID is a covert disorder. Stuff like dissociation isn't easy to pick up on and when it is, it could be due to a number of things from ADHD or depression to a non-epileptic seizure. And while these conditions are often comorbid with DID, they aren't the same thing and can happen independently. How would a group/individual be able to pick up on the dissociative state of the child they were abusing, and be able to tell that this was, in fact, DID forming and not a seperate dissociative disorder like maladaptive daydreaming, depersonalization-derealization disorder, etc?

And why would they deliberately give a child DID? In most cases (as far as I'm aware, that is), DID was not an intended outcome. It's one of many results of one of many uncontrollable protective responses to trauma. It just happens, often without the abuser's or even the victim's knowledge. There is so much risk and none of the benefit of doing something like this.

Programming Alters

Most if what I know of "programming" comes from here which is honestly just a list of trauma responses. I'm not going to go through them all because it's a long list and I only have so much mental energy but I'll go through some that caught my eye.

"Alpha" is a fawn trauma response.

"Beta" is hypersexual behavior/alters or just simply developing a kink from your abuse (a very common occurrence).

"Zeta" is desensitization.

"Eta" is a helplessness commonly seen in victims of consistant abuse.

Then moving in to more psychogenic "programs". First, for those who may not know, psychogenic means that a physical sensation or issue is caused by psychological responses. For example, Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures (PNES). Or a simpler example, experiencing dizziness or maybe joint pain being truggered by something emotionally stressful.

"Narco" sounds like psychogenic fainting.

"Amnesia" could be a psychogenic case of selective amnesia.

"Scramble" could be brainfog.

"Shutdown" could be a conversion disorder, now known as Functional Neurological Disorder (FND). My mom has this disorder. Her mental stress converts into physical symptoms where her mind will slow down and her body will become paralized. She doesn't even have a complex dissociative disorder. Just putting up with my dad's shit for so long took a toll on her and that toll has continued years later.

Conclusion

I'm gonna be fr, I started this weeks ago but dropped it because I ran out of spoons and couldn't pick back up with the same energy so I don't really rememer where exactly I was going with this but yeah. Feel free to share your thoughts with me.

[jonesatheart]

Touch Averse

Some more plot exploration from the WIP containing Alleyway and Make It Stop. If this piece is included in the final version of this work it will likely come toward the end after both of the above mentioned posts, but they are not required for context here. That said, there is implied and allusions to past noncon.

April relaxed back against Casey's side, stretching her arm across his lap as she did so, and rest her hand on the outside of his thigh.

She glanced up when he took her hand by sliding his own underneath hers and squeezing it lightly.

"Casey?"

"Hm?"

"Are you comfortable like this?"

He frowned and glanced down at her. "Yeah, but I can move if you need more room or somethin'."

April smiled wryly at him. "You're already up against the arm of the couch so good luck with that. I meant with my arm on you." She squeezed his hand.

Casey glanced down at her arm rested across his legs. "I mean, I hadn't really thought about it. I guess so."

April nodded. "I just noticed that when I sit like this with you, you pick my hand up off your leg and I want to make sure I'm not making you uncomfortable or touching you in a way you don't like."

"Oh. I...guess I hadn't really noticed it," he chuckled, non committal.

"It's okay if it does," April assured. "I'm not going to be offended. You're allowed to tell me not to touch you in specific ways or even at all," she added when an uncertain look passed over his face. He pulled his feet from the table and April pulled her arm away to let him sit up more fully. "I don't want to put you through all that again."

"Guess I just...hadn't thought about it before."

April nodded. "That makes sense, that's what your brain used to protect you before."

Casey snorted. "Some protection. Feels more like I let myself be abused."

"The things our brains do, especially when it comes to things like trauma, don't always make sense, sweetie. When put into a new and scary situation, your brain froze and chose to wait out what was happening and maybe even went to fawn to prevent anything else bad happening to you. That's not your fault. Not wanting to think about it or talk about it is another way your brain tries to protect you. Like your body tuning out chronic pain in order to maintain functioning in life."

"That's not really a healthy thing to do," Casey noted.

"No, it's not," April agreed. "But sometimes it is what we have to do. And coping skills are things that can be learned and adapted. And while some are maladaptive, that doesn't make them useless. In moments of danger fawning and freezing have helped and protected you, and humans, especially autistic and traumatized ones are very good at picking out patterns, even if they're not always consciously aware of it. And when those patterns are seen even in the slightest way, the brain will fall back on what it knows works."

"That's why I never thought about the whole being touched thing." Casey sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. "I hate this," he murmured.

"I know, sweetheart, but being aware is what let's us start finding better things to cope and help us feel more comfortable existing in moments like this without relying on those fight or flight type responses."

"I don't even know where to start with that though," Casey complained.

"You're doing it right now," April encouraged. "You're having an incredibly vulnerable conversation with me and you're staying present and not just agreeing with everything I say. Anxiety being present doesn't inherently mean your doing something wrong."

"It helps I don't feel like I gotta worry about you gettin' mad at me."

"I'm really glad you feel safe with me. I feel safe with you too. I think that's a big reason of why we can have these conversations. Because as hard and scary and vulnerable as they are, we feel safe with each other."

"Bein' nervous or afraid isn't always bad though, right?"

"I think it depends on what's behind them and what they set off. But I don't think they're inherently bad, they just might need a little extra conversation."

Casey nodded.

"What are you thinking?"

"Thinking I kinda wanna try starting over. But actually pay attention this time."

"With my hand on your leg?"

Just another nod.

"Okay. We can absolutely do that. It is okay if you decide if you don't like it, though," April reminded as Casey leaned into the back of the couch. Once he was settled she nestled against his side again then rested her arm across his lap, resting her hand again on the outside of his thigh.

"I think I figured it out, but ya can't look at me otherwise I'm gonna get stuck."

"I'm listening," April promised, keep her eyes on the coffee table.

"I don't think I mind ya hand there, but the whole arm feels like...too much. But I pick ya hand up so I can feel like I can move it when I need to move without makin' it a whole thing. The other thing is the whole...'feels good' phrase kinda...makes it feel...gross. The context it's usually in makes my insides squirm."

April pulled her arm back and rested her hand on Casey's knee nearest her. "Is this more comfortable?"

"I think so."

"Okay, thank you for telling me. I'll do my best to not do the other. Is asking if something is comfortable okay or do you want to come up with another way I can check in with you?"

"That one's okay. It sounds less..."

"Sexual?" April offered. She smiled at the grimace she was sure Casey was sporting. "It's okay. Honey, I am not going to mock you for being uncomfortable with those topics or themes."

"I feel stupid for it," he answered quietly.

April took a breath and decided to take a calculated risk. "You are more than welcome to tell me no, but I can I blunt about something for a second?"

"Is this one of those 'you know I love you, right?' kind of a things?"

April thougt for a moment. "Kind of. It is something that might be hard or a little uncomfortable to hear, but it's not exactly 'tough love' like the other is usually used for." She waited patiently for Casey to decide.

"Yeah, alright, lets hear it," he decided.

"Being sex averse in anyway will never make you less of a man. Especially not to me. I know society and stereotypes would tell you otherwise, but they don't care about you and they're wrong. They're so wrong. The expectations put on you aren't fair, the things that society would lead to believe you need to place your self-worth in a wrong. You are invaluable to me as you are. And being sex and touch averse can never take anything away from you."

"Thanks, April," Casey answers quietly.

"No matter what kind of relationship we have, even if we just stay here, I'm always going to care about you. That isn't something you're ever going to have to earn with me."

[mimzy-writing-online]

You probably know this by now, I don't know if you keep up with Whumptober, but one of the prompts this year includes "blindness". I'm not blind but based on your posts about writing blind characters, and based on how I would feel if one of my disabilities were used as a whump prompt, I'm not super comfortable with it. I was wondering what your thoughts are on blindness being a Whumptober prompt.

(unironically and with feeling) thanks, I hate it.

Yes, I’m familiar with Whumptober, but I’ve never participated myself and I haven’t seen this year’s prompts.

Edit: I later did see the prompts and check out the blog. I think it's a good set of prompts and I look forward to all the promising content, especially since some of my favorite tropes are there. To be clear before you read this, I have no problem with Whumptober2021 or whump in general. This is not the first time blindness has been included for a list of whump prompts, and it won't be the last.

This post directed at the concept of "blindness" as a whump prompt and why I think it's a bad idea. The intended audience is individual writers thinking about future projects.

The timing of this is almost too perfect because I read a fanfic earlier this week that would meet that prompt exactly. Tags included whump, blindness, and angst with a happy ending. Now whump, hurt/comfort, and angst with a happy ending are tags I enjoy reading, but blindness as whump has a specific message to it.

To explain that message, I want to discuss what whump is. Many readers are already familiar with the genre, but I think taking the specific definitions and picking apart what it means and what expectations we carry when reading whump fanfiction

Urban Dictionary defines it as: taking a character and putting them through physical and/or mental torment and is typically followed by the same character being treated for their traumas. To indicate the characters place in the situation they’d typically be called a whumpee (the character being hurt/comforted), the whumper (the character that causes harm and trauma), and the caretaker (the character designated the helping/healing/comforting the whumpee).

Fanlore has a page for whump that explains it in depth, including where it started in fanfiction, examples of whump, and even a list of “popular targets” in different fandoms. (Warning: you might find yourself called out on the popular targets list)

“The term whump (or whumping) generally refers to a form of Hurt/Comfort that is heavy on the hurt and is often found in gen stories. The exact definition varies and has evolved over time. Essentially, whump involves taking a canon character, and placing them in physically painful or psychologically-damaging scenarios. Often this character is a fan favorite…”

To add to that, I think an important detail is the distinction Fanlore makes between hurt/comfort and whump:

“While some communities and fandoms may use whump as a synonym for hurt/comfort, there is still a recognition that whump refers to darker and more extreme scenarios. And there are still whump fics been written that have very little, or no comfort at the end of the story.”

The big appeal of hurt/comfort is getting to both explore the darker sides of pain and then experience the catharsis of being taken care of, of being supported by your loved ones as you recover from the trauma. The character is the proxy for experiencing those highs and lows while you yourself are safe at home.

I personally don’t read much/any whump without some h/c involved, but I’m happy there are stories out there for people who do enjoy it. I’m not here to judge what you like reading or what you do to your characters.

What I want is to express how blindness, my disability, used as a whump prompt personally makes me feel and what message it sends to me, to others, and how that message affects my daily life.

Whump undeniably involves watching a character suffer through something painful and traumatic.

My use of the word “suffer” is what I want you to focus on.

Vision loss can be painful and traumatic. I personally developed an anxiety disorder in response to vision loss. Others experience depression. For some it might result in relapsing into old, maladaptive coping mechanisms like drug use, self harm, or eating disorders.

A big part of my anxiety was how people reacted to my vision loss. It was a cause of their stress. They were worried because they genuinely believed I would never live a happy life without normal vision, and that my life would only be struggle and pain.

I recently saw an old friend who hadn’t heard about my vision loss. The conversation was awkward, but the worst part was how they reacted as though I had experienced an insurmountable tragedy. And even when I assured them I’m happy with my life, they clearly didn’t believe me. They acted like I was just lying or in denial.

I love that people want to empathize with my situation and ask themselves what they would do in my situation, but I hate when the conclusion they come to is something along the lines of “I could never do that, I’d be too miserable thinking about everything I lost, I’d never be able to do anything I enjoyed ever again.” But I did go blind. And I’m not miserable, I’m actually happy with the direction my life is going, and I still enjoy my hobbies, even if I engage with them differently.

I’m not suffering. My life didn’t end with vision loss. It’s not ruined, broken, or worthless.

I read a fanfic that was tagged with whump, blindness, and angst with a happy ending. A general synopsis of the plot: the whumpee had gone blind due to a curse. It was true love’s kiss that broke the curse. Even from the summary I knew it was going to end with whumpee being cured somehow and that I’d leave that fanfic vaguely dissatisfied no matter how good the rest of the fanfic was.

I can say this for the fanfic: the whumpee had already accepted that they would likely be blind for the rest of their life, but everyone around them was treating it as a tragedy that needed to be fixed, working tirelessly for a cure despite the whumpee’s protests that they didn’t have to.

It actually hit home to my personal experience.

I still left it dissatisfied with the ending. I might love curse fics in that fandom, and I love the “true love’s kiss” trope, but it wasn’t enough to distract me from the fact that: an actual person out in the world thought the best happy ending, maybe the only happy ending, would be if the character got their sight back.

(note: I clicked kudos and exited out of the story's page because no fanfic writer deserves unsolicited critique or hate, especially for content I consumed for free and at my own volition.)

Why read a story I knew would disappoint me?

Because blindness representation is so damn rare that I feel like I’m wandering in a desert, dying from thirst and desperate for that oasis. But sometimes that oasis is a mirage and the author is unintentionally telling you that your life is actually awful and you’ll never be fully happy like this. And that is a shit mentality to walk through life with.

I don’t appreciate blindness being a whump plot. I hate it. Hundreds (thousands?) of fanfictions featuring blind characters are about to enter the internet and the overall message is going to be “You poor thing! You must be in so much pain, you must be miserable! Who’s going to save you? Who’s going to comfort you? Wouldn’t it be terrible if there was no one in your life to take care of you? You poor helpless thing!”

And I feel objectified. I feel trivialized. The mirage in the desert is going to become a starch, empty room filled with dozens of water bottles, almost all of them poisoned. My representation is going to hurt me personally, and it’s going to reinforce that idea strangers have about how awful my life must be.

(I returned to school this past month, and every day I’m hesitant to tell someone I’m visually impaired because I don’t want to be treated differently. If I’ve managed to pass as sighted this whole time and then suddenly reveal “oh yeah, I’m visually impaired” I feel this instant silence, this pause of awkwardness as people suddenly question how they’re supposed to treat me. They treated me like a person, and now I’m something strange and unfamiliar.)

I’ve worked so hard to improve representation for blind people, to give internet strangers the exposure to a blind person they need to normalize blindness because I hope that if they’re ever so lucky as to meet a blind person, they’ll treat that person with respect. That hope that another person in the blind community will find a friend they feel comfortable and accepted with. I hope that I’ll meet people who accept my blindness as just another aspect of me (like being bisexual or gender fluid or a writer or a cat lover).

Please don’t turn me and my community into a caricature. Don’t erase everything I’ve worked for with this blog.

To be clear, this is not just me saying "I hate the cure trope" again. This is me saying "the purpose of whump is to painfully hurt your favorite character, and I hate that your idea of pain and suffering is my daily (wonderful) life."

[blakelywintersfield]

As a victim of gun violence myself, I will be keeping my guns, thanks. Fear mongering? Maybe a little bit the fact is politicians absolutely “hell yes I want to take your AR15, your AK47”. They’ve said it often and loudly that they would like you to be disarmed. If you feel no one in your home is mentally stable enough for a gun, great, but you have zero right to tell others they should do the same.

1. If you're a victim of gun violence then the NRA gives absolutely NO fucks about you. You're not a victim of gun violence in their eyes, you're a victim of a criminal who happened to have a gun. Calling it "gun violence" is liberal propaganda to blame the gun, instead of the person. The gun didn't create the violence, the person did. That's their shitbrained logic and that's how they would respond to you if you told them (without disclosing if you're a gun owner or not) "I was a victim of gun violence." Because just like your dumb ass, they're not responsible gun owners, they're reactionary gun owners, and if you're reactionary as opposed to rational, you shouldn't have dangerous weapons, and your "you can't tell me what to do" 5-year-old attitude towards that would not hold up in a myriad of other scenarios. By your logic, suspending the driver's license of an elderly individual with dementia is unconstitutional. Not allowing someone with chronic seizures to drive is unconstitutional. Not allowing people to sell food without meeting safety and sanitation standards is unconstitutional. "You can't tell me what to do 'cause muh freedumb" isn't a fucking part of the constitution, you're just a chronic nationalist boot deep-throater whose mommy told him that the world owed him everything.

2. Where did I say guns should be taken away from you, or anyone else in my tags. Where? Here, I'll post the fucking screenshot of it and you can highlight it:

Please show me where I said "people should have their guns taken away" you reactionary cowardly fuck. I'll wait.

3. Politicians stating "no one needs a stockpile of AK47s" is not synonymous with "we want to take your guns". Gun buy-back programs that are VOLUNTARY are not the same as threatening to "take your guns". What benefit would you, as one person, gain from owning 5 semi-automatic weapons in the argument of "self-defense"? Are you going to wield one in each hand, one with each foot, and one with the mouth you can't seem to fucking shut? Do you think any of these weapons would protect you against government militia (which is what the second amendment is FOR, for one, and which the NRA does NOT condone if it's conservative sanctioned militia takeover) breaking into your property with a force of 10 people in bulletproof gear and military-grade weapons that could probably blow your fucking empty head off your body in one shot? Or do you like owning all of these shiny scary-looking toys for intimidation, thinking it'll protect you from future violence, like a fucking Halloween house made to scare away children? If that's your reasoning, then you definitely need therapy because that's textbook maladaptive coping with trauma -- I'd know because I have my own array of self-defense weapons that I got in response to my traumatic event, including a knife that could fatally gut an adult man with one stab. That's not a reasonable response to trauma!! But at least I can admit it! Your pisswad ass on the other hand can't, and views anyone saying "the NRA is a shit organization that doesn't support responsible gun ownership or the responsibility of gun owners and their actions, and is essentially a domestic terrorist grooming organization" as an attack on you as an individual, because you can't stomach the idea that maybe, just fucking maybe, you may be on that list of people who shouldn't have a gun because you're too mentally fucked up to be trusted with something like that, like people who are chronically suicidal (in other words, the MAJORITY OF GUN RELATED DEATHS), people with psychotic tendencies that can lead to hurting themselves or others (not because people with psychosis are "scary evil people", but because those moments of psychosis literally keep a person from making rational observations and decisions, and these individuals are already advised to have possible harmful tools locked up or just not in the house for their own safety), people like incels that believe if their entitlement is denied that they have the right to murder, etc. Honestly, you do sound like someone who shouldn't have guns, because your unstable ass probably read up to the second tag and skimmed the rest in a blind rage before sending an ask two days after I made that post, and seemed to conveniently miss the end:

What's your reasoning for the NRA keeping silent about responsible black gun owners being gunned down by police because the cops know they're legally registered gun owners (Jason Washington, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, whom the NRA defended being murdered by police while pulled over for a traffic violation, in his car with his wife and CHILD, and verbally informed the cop like a responsible gun owner that he had a conceal and carry permit, and was reaching for his wallet in plain view of his family and the fucking pig)? What's your reasoning behind them callously dismissing police violence against black people who are unarmed or have a history of supporting gun control (Botham Jean, Clementa Pinckney, fucking JAMES SHAW JR., WHO STOPPED A MASS SHOOTING WHILE UNARMED HIMSELF), as though that makes it their fault they were murdered, injured, or otherwise victimized? What's your reasoning behind them only piping up about "muh guns" whenever politicians say "there's a gun problem" after the 29th public shooting that month, but not tackling the issue of gun control disproportionately impacting people of color while letting crazy little white kids run loose with a multitude of firearms? What's your reasoning behind them siding with idiot fascist Trump's temper tantrum over the NFL's protests on police violence -- something they, once again, consistently respond to with "they should've been armed" if the black person wasn't, and give complete fucking radio static to if the black person was armed (even if legally armed)? They're so against gun control, but never seem to care when it affects black and brown people -- only when Jack Incelson, age 16, who posts on 4chan about how he wants to cut women's heads off and fuck their dead bodies, is at risk of not being allowed to keep his AR15. If people of color are killed while armed, it's justified because "they had a gun"; if people of color are killed while unarmed, it's their fault because "they should've had a gun" -- this is something the NRA is notorious for, because they don't give a flying fuck about people who should have the right to arm themselves.

4. On that point: I fully support the Socialist Rifle Association, even as someone who does not want to own guns -- because, as stated in the post you're shitting your diaper over -- I support organizations that vouch for responsible gun owners. The SRA holds irresponsible gun owners accountable. They actually support people's right to bear arms to defend themselves against tyrannical government forces. They are active in disaster aid, in environmental defense, in protecting people of color. I do not like guns but I 100% support the SRA, because they fight for people who do need to arm themselves to have that right, and I support that sentiment. I believe people of color should be able to arm themselves. I believe queer people should be able to arm themselves. I believe poor people should be able to arm themselves. But the NRA doesn't actively fight for any of those groups' rights -- the SRA does.

But you know what the SRA doesn't do? Send out unsolicited letters begging lower-middle-class white people for money so they can "fight the gun-hating liberals" from "taking away our guns n freedumb" and offering "i <3 guns" bumper stickers and shit in return. They don't view any political party as their friend because they know that Republicans and Democrats alike do not actually want you to be able to defend yourself against the government. They don't send fear-mongering letters full of hyperbolic bullshit to scare people into thinking that Biden or Obama or whatever Democrat is in the office is going to break into your house with police, beat your wife and children, and steal your guns while cackling maniacally over you as you sob "why mister president? why would you do this to your loyal and patriotic citizens?" The SRA opposes gun control laws that unfairly target demographics that are at the highest risk of police violence. The NRA does not, and, in fact, has a very heavily documented history of siding with conservatism, including making statements about things that don't even involve guns -- stating that American men are being turned into "second-rate women", outcried banning anti-queer discrimination and compared the ban to slavery, made a call to imprison people protesting against Trump's Cabinet picks, called the Women's March anti-American. These are all recent you shithead, so you must be purposely ignoring all of this to feel justified in defending this domestic terrorist organization, or you're probably a self-victimizing white man who can't handle being told no. Or maybe both. I don't know and I don't fucking care.

Don't fucking message me again. Unfollow me if you were previously following me and haven't already. Get some fucking therapy instead of crawling through strangers' blogs trying to find a reason to justify your irrational anger at them. And while you're at it, do me a huge favor, you cowardly fucking cunt: go to your nearest sex shop, buy 5 gallons of lube, pour them over your guns, and shove each and every one of them, fully loaded, up your ass. That way you can keep a close eye on them since your head is obviously already lodged up there.

Alternatively, you can eat shit and die.

[wanderingdragoon]

Answering These Myself~!

Ask a question, any question! Because I have nothing better to do than to answer your questions. … No, really. I don’t. D:

1: What does their bedroom look like?

Aric’s room tends to be pretty sparse, not because of being clean, but simply because he likes to travel lightly. His few items are more or less strewn in a pile, his lance nearby.

2: Do they have any daily rituals?

Aric tends to wrap his lance daily, unwrapping it late at night before bed, to check for damage. He leaves the binding for the morning, so he can check for any damage or change in the material.

3: Do they exercise, and if so, what do they do? How often?

He’s pretty lazy, but he does prefer to walk on his own, so he’s constantly keeping fit with his wandering between the city states of Eorzea. 

4: What would they do if they needed to make dinner but the kitchen was busy?

Aric would either complain loudly that he’s hungry, whining until he was fed or was allowed to make himself a meal. That, or he’d try to come back later if he knew the person wouldn’t budge or feed him. 

5: Cleanliness habits (personal, workspace, etc.)

While he doesn’t own many things, he can still be pretty disorganized and messy with what he does carry on him. Removing his tabard prior to sleeping or bathing tends to be a trail of discarded articles of clothing leading to the bed or bath.

6: Eating habits and sample daily menu

Aric will eat literally anything, and it can get him into trouble. He’ll sample nearly any form of cuisine, and if he’s out in the fields and he becomes hungry, he’ll either hunt, fish or even try to eat a fiend or two. This can cause trouble for his party members, as he will generally offer them some of whatever he’s just caught.

7: Favorite way to waste time and feelings surrounding wasting time

Aric is a procrastinator, he has next to no motivation to actually do much of anything and enjoys to take things easy. Whether watching the skies, taking a nap, eating or merely walking around, he’ll actively avoid doing much of anything productive. The Scions often wonder and worry about how much actual work he could get done if he put the amount of energy into doing his work that he does into avoiding his responsibilities and assignments.

8: Favorite indulgence and feelings surrounding indulging

Aric loves to simply relax, watch the skies, the clouds and the coming and going of people within the settlements he drifts through. To him, merely taking time out of the day to rest and relax is the point for his freedom and seeks to do so whenever possible.

9: Makeup?

The scar over his left eye is false, drawn on with waterproof makeup. He tends to wash it away each time he bathes and recreates it nearly perfectly each time. He’ll swap sides, add new ones and even fake facial hair as needed to further his disguises.

10: Neuroses? Do they recognize them as such?

He used to have a fear of the skies, like most Ishgardian children. For the first few years on the run, he had issues with maladaptive coping and responses to stressful situations, but he has gotten better. He can still panic when he’s exposed to situations like when he was afraid he’d die for nothing, akin to his childhood in Dragoon training back in Ishgard.

11: Intellectual pursuits?

Aric is pretty lazy when it comes to many things, and while he is literate and formally schooled, he has no desire to grow that knowledge much. He however picks up tacit information of trade routes, trouble spots and other street wise experiences during his travels.

12: Favorite book genre?

If he can avoid reading, he will. If he can select a photo book of the sky, he will.

13: Sexual Orientation? And, regardless of own orientation, thoughts on sexual orientation in general?

Mostly heterosexual, but he has a few men in his life whom he does share romantic feelings for. Overall, whatever someone chooses to do, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, is celebrated by him.

14: Physical abnormalities? (Both visible and not, including injuries/disabilities, long-term illnesses, food-intolerances, etc.)

Aric’s false scar on his face is part of his disguise, as is the eyepatch he wears. He has some burn scars and stab wounds from encounters with the Dravians during his time growing up in Ishgard.

15: Biggest and smallest short term goal?

To stay a step ahead of his family���s hunters looking for him to bring him back to the Holy See for his crimes against Ishgard

16: Biggest and smallest long term goal?

To keep wandering the land, seeing the world for how it truly is, far from the war in Ishgard. 

17: Preferred mode of dress and rituals surrounding dress

Aric regularly wears a red tabard over a mail hauberk, white jodhpurs tucked into high boots and long gloves over his mail sleeves. He prefers something light and easy to move in, but armored enough to keep him safe. 

18: Favorite beverage?

Aric prefers to stay away from anything alcoholic, but he enjoys juices made from fruits or vegetables, anything sweet. 

19: What do they think about before falling asleep at night?

Often, if it’s about the information he’s learned of the day. Ideally, he feels safe enough to sleep without worrying over being caught by the Inquisitors. 

20: Childhood illnesses? Any interesting stories behind them?

Aric suffered from agoraphobia and casadastraphobia, fear of open spaces and being taken into the sky, learned from his family and elder brothers during his time preparing to fight in the Dragonsong War. His eldest brother used to condition his younger siblings by diving upon them at random intervals, and then leaping back into the sky to simulate an attack by dragons to see how they’d react.

21: Turn-ons? Turn-offs?

Aric dislikes domineering, controlling or manipulative behavior when it’s in earnest. He doesn’t mind the occasional bratty or spoiled antics, but a genuine desire to control and own him or his choices makes him instantly defensive and resistant. He enjoys when others respect his desire to self determine, and respects those who choose for themselves and follow their own paths. Kindness and warmth, respect and understanding are attributes he enjoys. 

22: Given a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and nothing to do, what would happen?

He’d probably fold up the paper into the shape of a bird and toss it to watch it fly. The pencil would be possibly tossed at one of his party members or pocketed for later use.

23: How organized are they? How does this organization/disorganization manifest in their everyday life?

Aric is rather laid back, disliking the obligation for order and rigidity he was raised to abide to in Ishgard. He tends to arrive late, if he shows at all, with a lazy, unbelievable excuse. If he has a mess, he’ll shrug and make a half joking comment about it, then ignore it.

24: Is there one subject of study that they excel at? Or do they even care about intellectual pursuits at all?

Aric is formally trained as a Dragoon and Lancer for the Dragonsong War, and learned the necessities and tenents of this position, along with the teachings of the Holy See. Most of his information he currently uses he gathered during his travels, such as learning of trade routes, changes in weather, predicting how a group of people will react, for example if a bar brawl will break out and how to calm the situation, exacerbate it for his needs or escape without a sound. One skill he prides himself on is the prediction of weather based on his knowledge of the skies.

25: How do they see themselves 5 years from today?

He honestly sees himself either continuing wandering Eorzea, looking for odd jobs to feed him for the day, or helping out passerbys with any random event they may need.

26: Do they have any plans for the future? Any contingency plans if things don’t workout?

Aric just wants to be left to his own devices, permitted to go where he chooses, when he chooses, with little restricting his travels. He’ll go where the wind takes him.

27: What is their biggest regret?

His biggest regrets come from his time in Ishgard/Coerthas. He regrets how he and his friends were put in the line against the Dravanian Hordes to fight and die, without knowing much of the world beyond the Dragonsong War and what the Holy See decided for him. He regrets taking so long for choosing to run away and that he couldn’t bring any of his training legion with him prior to their deaths.

28: Who do they see as their best friend? Their worst enemy?

Rotatu Neotatu, the Lalafell Scholar he met in his travels is quite easily his closest of friends and confidant. There are few he trusts more than the Lalafell Scholar.

His worst enemy has to be the Holy See of Ishgard, the nobles and the Inquisitors sent after him during his escape from his homeland.

29: Reaction to sudden extrapersonal disaster (eg The house is on fire! What do they do?)

Depending on circumstances, he may not even get involved. If the situation doesn’t involve him or threaten him, he’ll opt to simply not get involved and walk away. However, he does not have much patience or forgiveness for those who oppress the freedoms of others, such as slavers or those who abuse their authority. He may get involved, but hide his actions behind ‘accidental’ interference. 

30: Reaction to sudden intrapersonal disaster (eg close family member suddenly dies)

Aric has been pretty desensitized by his experiences in Ishgard, and tends to smile through troubles and emotional trauma. He has learned to put on an act and avoid such emotional responses, at least overtly and in public. He tends to feel remorse if it was his fault, but he tries to be optimistic. 

31: Most prized possession?

When he fled the Holy See, he stole his family’s magical relics; a signet ring befitting his position of noble descent, however tangential, which can unlock the true power of the item he stole, the family heirloom lance. He is very protective of the item, and is rather dedicated to its upkeep.

32: Thoughts on material possessions in general?

Aric travels lightly, never with too much to his name outside of the clothing on his back, a small amount of gil, and his family heirlooms. He tends to donate or sell whatever he finds along the way to secure funds for lodging, repairs or food.

33: Concept of home and family?

Aric had a very strained relationship with his family prior to his desertion, their religious fervor and fanatical devotion to their roles as Dragoons in service to Ishgard, to kill the Horde or die in glorious combat left him feeling resentful of his role in their lives as just another expendable soldier. While he is certain family and home are important, he never truly had either, so he feels as if he doesn’t need either. 

34: Thoughts on privacy? (Are they a private person, or are they prone to ‘TMI’?)

Aric is deceptively private. While extroverted, candid and readily engaging with even strangers, nothing he ever offers or speaks of are wholly genuine of his true self. He offers stories, grandiose and mundane, anecdotes and more, but it always seems to be just a story or an act. With a smile and a wave, he dismisses many attempts to genuinely bond with others, instead managing to turn the tables, spin the conversation or distract the curious away without ever doing so overtly.

35: What activities do they enjoy, but consider to be a waste of time?

He enjoys helping others with their troubles, but politely and optimistically chastises them for worrying about such small things, instead telling them to relax and enjoy life as a whole. 

36: What makes them feel guilty?

He has turned and abandoned more than his fair share of people when he feels the Inquisition are near. He knows they trusted him, or expected him to be there for a while longer, but he slips away and focuses on running from his pursuers.

37: Are they more analytical or more emotional in their decision-making?

Aric is a mixture of the pair. While he avoids cold, hard logic, he tends to cite following the heart, but understanding that emotions do cloud the mind. He strives to argue that there needs to be a balance, otherwise any decision is doomed to be a disaster.

38: What recharges them when they’re feeling drained?

Sitting down and gazing at the skies above tend to make him feel relaxed, rejuvenated and raise his spirits. 

39: Would you say that they have a superiority-complex? Inferiority-complex? Neither?

Aric may act slightly arrogant, but it’s a facade he puts on to avoid scrutiny from others and to relax his mind and that of his group. He tends to feel a bit inadequate at times, questioning his place and role with groups such as the Scions of the Seventh Dawn or the Grand Companies. He doesn’t understand why any of the more higher ranked members of these groups even bother with someone like him, leading to doubts over whether or not he is capable of doing much to help anyone. 

40: How misanthropic are they?

After running from Ishgard, he was rather despondent and cynical from the loss of his training legion, his betrayal of his family and the Holy See. He distrusted nearly everyone he came into contact with for sometime until he learned how to move past it. He’s grown and healed, but he dislikes the powerful elite, who often tramples over the rights and freedoms of the normal citizens. He prefers to stick to wandering the trade routes over the hustle and bustle of the large cities.

41: Hobbies?

People watching, cloud watching, sky watching, singing and whistling to himself.

42: How far did they get in formal education? What are their views on formal education vs self-education?

As a former member of the nobility, Aric was privileged in his upbringing, having access to a formal education. As it was geared towards the desires and needs of the theocracy of the Holy See, his role in the Dragonsong War, he found that it had little application usage in other areas of Eorzea, and quickly began to learn all he could to survive in the world now as a wanderer.

43: Religion?

Aric is an apostate of the Ishgard Orthodox Church, the Holy See of Ishgard and has been dubbed a heretic by the Inquisition, despite not joining the Dravanian Horde. He has no desire to correct their declarations and maintains a large amount of disdain for the Church and the Holy See’s trappings and teachings.

44: Superstitions or views on the occult?

While he knows of the superstitions of the Holy See, among some other cultures, Aric sees such things are pretty much nonsense. However, he does hold grave respects for the weapons of the fallen, and often tries to bring them to rest with the fallen or to their families.

45: Do they express their thoughts through words or deeds?

Aric is a mixture of both, opting to elaborate and exaggerate with grandiose tales and retellings of anecdotes, or pledges, while also being quite confident in his abilities, however, he tends to play off these actions as accidental or unintentional.

46: If they were to fall in love, who (or what) is their ideal?

Despite his lack of commitment, Aric is relatively monogamous, and he’d prefer some loyalty to be returned in kind. Idealistically, it will be involving someone who he can be both aspects of his self with, someone he can trust to protect him, choose to be with over other bonds, as he will be giving equally of himself. Love is a partnership, one of mutual respect, trust and vision, and he’ll look for a partner who can understand him, and one he can understand in kind.

47: How do they express love?

Aric is very vocal and prominent, he’ll lavish praise, grandiose and mundane, upon his lover. He’ll go out of his way to find trinkets and gifts for them, and fabricate a tale concerning how he fought a horde of rabid behemoths at the market for such a prize. No task is too dangerous, no journey too far to bring glory and riches to his love, even if it’s all an elaborate story or outright lie on how he acquired the gift. 

Beyond his childish antics, he is a trusting lover. He tends to put their needs beyond anything else, even his personal freedoms and safety, so a moment of betrayal, whether purposeful or due to conflicting loyalties is taken heavily.

48: If this person were to get into a fist fight, what is their fighting style like?

Outside of normal combat, a lot of his actions are made to look accidental or unintentional to hide his trained skill as a knight of Ishgard. In hand to hand combat, he would stay smiling, a joke on his lips, and use his foot to trip up his opponent, or ‘accidentally’ strike them with his limbs while trying to run away or while pretending to fall.

49: Is this person afraid of dying? Why or why not?

Aric has a fear of death, but more so, his fear is over dying for a pointless cause because an authority dictated that he do so. He ran away from Ishgard because not wishing to die a pointless death in an unending war, due to the Archbishop and his family’s orders. When exposed to the Scions of the Seventh Dawn and the political troubles of the Grand Companies and Eorzea’s cities, he has similar fears and concerns over how readily he is thrown into conflict by those in power.

[nerdygaymormon]

I'm... scared... of your blog. It goes against a whole lot of what I was taught to believe and follow growing up. But, at the same time, I've been hurt deeply by that... doctrine... and I've only just begun to see and understand the extent of that damage. So... what if this is what my wounded and weeping soul has been searching for... since I can't pick up any "official text" without having a violent physical reaction that is drowning in pain and fear? 1/?

I can't even get near a chapel or temple without reacting. And I can't bring myself to confide in any of my local bishopric or ward members. As a result, I've been suffering alone. I know I need therapy because this is some deep, messed up shit, but I have not been able to find a compassionate professional and I'm not want to continue the search. I've neither the funds nor the energy. 2/?

I'm 34yo born and raised in the Church. Three years ago I experienced something that made me question heavily whether Gd still loved me because I for sure felt damned. And that event caused the floodgates to open, I suppose. I've not been active for years due to chronic illness and being treated like some sort of sub-human because of my disability. I used to maintain a current temple recommend but not anymore. 3/?

I think I'm asexual. And the more and more I think about this, the more and more it explains some aspects of me that I thought were broken. (No desire to date as a teen, no feelings of sexual attraction to anyone, confusion about terms like "infatuation" and "crush", confused and disgusted by sex and the world's obsession with it.) But, at the same time, the more and more I grew to like this term, the worse my feeling of being Rejected by Gd became. 4/? 

But, even before I adopted the term, I began to feel unwanted and damned because of a history of attempted molestation at 5 years old and being taught that I was 'chewed gum' amongst other doctrines that insisted that my every decision and move was responsible for the sexual purity of the male mind. I felt violated in almost everything that I wore that I felt "pretty" in because I was under the belief I was a walking sin. 5/?

I say I'm scared of your blog... yet I read through several posts last night, body shaking and nauseous with fear and guilt. And here I am, unloading in your askbox because I'm so desperate for someone to talk to who won't judge me like I've been judged all my life. The last time I went to church, I ran out of Sacrament in tears, hyperventilating in my car for several minutes. I have not been back since. 6/?

I want to believe that I'm still loved. I want to believe that I'm still wanted. There is a vicious war going in within me, complicated by chronic and mental illness, that I've lost my sensitivity concerning Gd. I can't tell if or when He's talking to me because the constant anxiety, fear and pain drown out the more 'subtle' emotions. And the maladaptive coping mechanisms I've developed likely don't help either... 7/?

Thank you for listening... if you have anything insightful that you think might help, I'd like to read it. (I hope all these messages stayed anonymous...) 8/8

———————————————————————

Wow, the feels. You said so much. I recognize you’re in a hard place. 

—————————  

Don’t worry, you managed to stay anonymous. I know when sending multiple asks it’s to forget to push the anon option.

—————————  

Congrats on figuring out you are asexual (ace). 

I think discovering a lack of something is difficult. There’s all these hints along the way but then once you figure it out, it all makes sense, everything fits.  

Don’t be afraid to change your labels. We use words to describe how we understand ourselves. If the way you understand yourself changes, it’s fine to change your labels. 

—————————  

Having a chronic illness can be difficult, it can take over a life as you organize things around it. Having a disability also can be challenging, especially if it’s one that is visible to others because they often view you as your disability. 

The thing is, you have a personality that wants to be displayed, I can tell that just from these messages you sent me. As people spend time with you and get to know you, they will start seeing you and not your disability. 

—————————  

Things that you described about your feelings and reactions make me believe therapy would help. I’m no mental health professional, but I wonder if you have have the symptoms of PTSD (church caused you trauma) and an anxiety disorder. 

If you have insurance that will cover some sessions, look for a provider that takes your insurance. If you don’t, I know that therapy can be expensive. 

About 2 years ago I needed to see a therapist and I checked at my local university. They had a psychological services clinic where Ph.D. students could gain experience, so the price was reduced, and my therapy was overseen by professors who are up-to-date in their field.  

If you can’t get to therapy now, and if you want to go to church, it helps a lot to have someone you know that can go with you, like a security blanket. It makes it less scary to enter that space. 

If you don’t have someone like that, try contacting the missionaries, explain you haven’t been to church in a while but want to come back. They will be so happy to greet you in the lobby and have you sit with them. And if you want, they will introduce you around to others. 

—————————  

Tbh, I was very surprised at how you describe my blog. I didn’t realize someone would view it the way you did. 

It’s true that I think our church is wrong on LGBTQIA+ topics. This is because of a few things:

1) I feel the spirit let me know that God loves me as I am, a gay man, and that I’m not broken. This is how I’m meant to be. 

2) What we learn about our Heavenly Parents and how they love us and are fair and just, and they treat us the same and view humankind as alike. I can’t believe they would set up a whole group of their children to fail and not have a path to return to them.

3) Jesus stood with those who were on the margins, He spent time lifting others and taught us that real religion is helping others, especially those who are downtrodden and on the margins. 

4) The Church doesn’t show LGBTQIA+ people as a part God’s Plan. The Church doesn’t know what to do with us. And it’s not a good space for queer people so most LGBTQIA+ members leave. This is not good fruit and it’s not what I think God would want, for whole groups of people to not feel welcomed.

I don’t reject the principles of the gospel, I want them to apply to all of us, even me, a gay man, and even you, an asexual woman. We are beautiful, we have a purpose, we deserve to be accepted and have joy. 

I guess that is rebellious and dangerous because it challenges the Church’s narrative about people like you and me. 

I let people in church tell me terrible things and for so long I believed them. I don’t anymore. 

Refusing the shame that church gives us as queer people, that’s radical. Church is supposed to help us be better, not wear us down. 

You can love yourself and be happy as ace. This is part of how God made you, you don’t have to deny this is how you experience life. 

—————————

What are your goals? What kind of person do you want to be? What do you want your life to be like? 

My psychologist used to have me write what I would like my life to be like, and then we made goals to start doing those. 

You are capable of change. 

This is your life. 

God has given you talents. We’re not supposed to hide them under a bushel. Work on developing them and developing yourself. 

You are your own longest investment. Investing in yourself is a gift to the world, it’s how we develop ourselves and increases our capacity to help others.

—————————

I hope you feel I understood what you were trying to say to me. 

I also hope I gave you some things to think about, to ponder, and figure out what feels right to you.

[havenmentalhc]

Feeling Safe Inside: The Value of Body-centered Trauma Therapy

Sometimes the hardest thing to do when you’re feeling hurt or unhappy is to pick up the phone and reach out for help. Often times it can feel like talking about what’s wrong is just too difficult, stressful or triggering. Perhaps you’ve spoken to someone before, even a therapist, and it left you feeling somehow incomplete, tense, or “stuck.”

If it feels like talking about your problems leaves you feeling worse, it might be that you’ve experienced trauma. It’s important to know that when we experience trauma, there can be a disconnect between our thoughts and our bodies. This is how we are wired to survive: by mobilizing and/or immobilizing in a way that turns off our rational thinking and puts us into fight, flight, freeze, or feigned death. In these moments, we are adapting quickly, whether to a car accident or physical abuse, or social exclusion in a way that allows us to get through that situation. Unfortunately, the disconnect that occurs can continue to be there for much longer, resulting in behaviors or attitudes that impede or otherwise negatively impact our life.

Finding a way to connect the response of our brain and body by bridging what we can accept mentally and absorb physically is extremely powerful, deep, and lasting. This is why therapies that combine your awareness of traditional psychotherapy and your physical body are often a more deeply rooted, satisfying, and effective way to heal and move forward.

The Value of Body-Centered Trauma Therapy

Traumatic experiences can often leave a person with symptoms that are frequently left unaddressed by more traditional therapies. Most of the time, talk-therapy focuses on the emotional and behavioral aspects of trauma. Those areas are accessed and addressed via your thoughts. Generally, they get the most attention and validation. While this is helpful and comforting, it does not address the areas of the brain that are activated during traumatic events, potentially leaving you with the unresolved confusing imagery, stuck sensations, and a lack of clarity regarding your self-perception.

Body-centered (somatic) therapy links the healing elements of verbal sharing with the power of bodily relief. It allows you to work through not only the thoughts and underlying beliefs that have resulted from the trauma, but accesses the healing capacity of the brain and body to develop a deeper, more felt sense of internal safety. The body, which holds the memories of our pain, sorrow, and fear becomes the means through which we work towards peace, calmness, hope, and happiness. Trauma therapy is rooted in working with the wisdom of the body to work through the past without re-traumatization and future growth.

Body-centered trauma therapy supports bodily awareness.

When unresolved trauma exists, it can show up as symptoms rather than memories. I’ve had a number of clients share their difficulties in day to day life without conscious recollection of their trauma. However, as therapy progresses, we are able to collaboratively recognize the impact of past hurts on a present day life that doesn’t feel satisfactory. Some of these symptoms include, but aren’t limited to:

Emotional overwhelm

Feelings of hopelessness, shame, worthlessness

Panic attacks

Depression, anxiety and/or irritability

Loss of a sense of self

Little or no memories

Hypervigilance or mistrust

Symptoms of trauma can also manifest physically. Some physical symptoms can include, but aren’t limited to:

Weakened immune function

Sexual dysfunction

Digestive difficulties

Unexplained physical pain or muscle tension

Hormonal imbalances

Eating Disorders or addiction

Chronic pain and/or headaches

You can see that overcoming trauma is not just a matter of controlling your thoughts. Trauma also creates continuing, internal tensions. Somatic therapy helps you tune into your breath, posture, and more to learn how your trauma is being held in your body and how you are being physically affected by the past.

Body-centered therapy helps you “reset”.

When trauma is experienced, the natural instinct to defend yourself cannot be carried out. The associated internal energy once meant to protect you, can become stuck and turn into maladaptive coping.

To recover, it is necessary to process the survival response inside ourselves. Sometimes, the traumas we experience happen so early in life that our physical sensations or tension seem normal. Sometimes the traumas we experience are the result of repeated and sometimes ongoing offenses and because trauma is stored in the body, it can often be difficult to put it into words and share it verbally. Somatic modalities of therapy recognize the myriad of ways that trauma impacts us in how we think, feel, act, engage with the world around us and how our physical bodies continue such patterned behaviors as a protective measure, even if it is no longer serving us. Body centered counseling allows us to uncover, access, and reset our responses in ways that we may not initially realize are related.

Body-centered therapy provides the skills to move forward

The goal of somatic therapy is not only to cultivate a deep level of healing, but to bring forward your innate wisdom and capacity to better manage stress and maintain a healthy mind-body connection. A commitment to trauma sensitive counseling leads to a renewed commitment to yourself through which you can master methods to self-soothe, feel grounded, and connect with your spiritual self as well. We all have the capacity to heal, cope, and grow. Trauma therapy taps into this capacity to foster resiliency and optimism as we move ahead.

Take the Next Step

The value of body-centered therapy is well worth the time and effort. By addressing shame and self criticism with compassion and curiosity, we can learn how these parts of ourselves are trying to help, and learn new, more effective ways of being. Most importantly, somatic work shows you that can live completely free of your trauma.

If this type of therapy interests you, please read more about trauma therapy to set up a consultation. Let us help you re-set the connection between your mind and body.

Finally, if you would like support, please contact us for a consultation to learn about how we can help you.

[creaturebehavior]

every once and awhile (every couple years) i google was an embryo at 8 weeks looks like and how big it is not necessarily in an attempt to retraumatize myself but because i am still trying to fully grasp and understand what happened. and also honestly it’s an attempt to try to validate the feeling of such gravity of the whole tning. to like,,, remind myself that it makes sense to have been as upset as i was/am and to feel a deep sense of loss around the entire event.

also can i just say i am so lost and confused by this grief. i want there to be an end in sight and i don’t think that’s realistic and i have no idea.

i also am just not at all sure what it looks like and feels like to have processed a trauma entirely. i don’t think i’ve ever fully processed any of my trauma, i have no idea. i mean the whole thing with trauma and PTSD is that is never goes away. but like. sometimes i worry, am i victimizing myself again and again when thinking about this whole thing? what do i need??

i know i need to talk about it. Not sure if i have anyone to talk about it with. My therapist is from the south and she’s Christian and i’m worried to address it with her at all. She’s a great therapist for addiction recovery but i’m afraid she won’t be able to validate or help me work through the feelings and the thoughts around this particular trauma so i don’t bring it up.

what am i looking for???

and i don’t go down this rabbit hole on purpose by the way, it always begins with a trigger. for example, tiktok just showed me a video about labor and childbirth and i started watching their other videos because i do find childbirth fascinating and then i came upon their videos of the embryo growing and then that compelled me to look up the thing i mentioned at the beginning of this post.

and similarly, like i get triggered sometimes seemingly out of nowhere like i couldn’t tell you what it was the other day while i was driving home something reminded me of being abandoned while pregnant and i dissociated the whole rest of the way home and i was just driving on autopilot while my brain gave me a play-by-play of everything that went down, from the day before i found out until the moment i got home after it happened and laid down on the floor in my living room and blacked out before falling asleep.

hello i’m crying. why is it still so painful? is the pain going to subside?

what do i do? what do i need? how do i get those needs met?

i carry this around and it’s so fucking heavy. and he barely feels the weight. he gets to pretend it never happened. i know it’s hard to face. i get that. i can’t blame anyone else for what they’re doing. that’s none of my business. i just do get angry sometimes that this is so heavily still with me so heavily weighing on my heart my mind my soul and i have this responsibility to deal with it and he’s got none of that, i get jealous. but i guess i can’t be jealous. cuz i blacked out for years all because of this. and i am sober now. i’m 25 years old somehow. i get to deal with this. and one day, i will feel less pain. that is a blessing. god knows i’m strong enough to do this. i pick myself up time again. i try to love myself the best i can. i am struggling with some maladaptive behaviors, but i’m doing better than i used to be doing. and it’s gonna get better. just like when i tried to numb the pain in my life by being in a relationship in early sobriety in 2017, i will one day get to a point where i am sick and tired of numbing the pain and i am ready to grow out of my numbing behaviors. i am getting there even when i don’t feel like it. ema, i’m sorry i keep you so fucking abused and messed up. it won’t be this way forever. i’m moving forward and growing up and i have no choice in the matter, all the time i am coming into who i am and who i am going to be. it’s fuckin hard. i get needing that pacifier i get needing an escape. god dammit we are doing this shit. sober as fuck. me and ema always just like day fucking one. i’m sorry i don’t know how to be gentler. but you’ve seen how i’ve gotten better. and it’s only going to get better from here. you’re gonna look back on this time in your life and be relieved that things changed. keep going. it hurts sometimes. this is the fucking process. it’s not pretty it’s not comfortable. keep going. i’m proud of you. you deserve to live better.

[uncloseted]

Why do you think mental health is so bad in our generation ? I feel like so many teenagers/ young adults struggle with mental health disorders, and the older generations didn't as much.

This is a long and complicated topic, so I recommend making yourself a cup of tea because we’re going to be here a while.

The TL;DR is basically: mental health issues are more widely discussed and less stigmatized, easier to diagnose, and the criteria for diagnosis is broader than before.  As a generation, we have collective trauma from 9/11.  We’re inundated with bad news from all over the world 24/7, and feel a personal responsibility to fix those problems, but can’t.  We’re inundated with information about how all of our habits are evil and feel personally responsible for changing them, but there are too many options and nothing seems good enough or like it’s working.  We’re inundated with the idea that everything is awful and the world is ending, and feel like we should be doing things about it but can’t. We have FOMO about everything and are constantly comparing our normal selves against other people’s best selves.  We were raised by helicopter parents with high expectations, told we could do anything, and then felt that anything that goes wrong is our own personal failing instead of a failing of the system.  Student debt is out of control, there are no jobs, and the system isn’t supporting us.  Our lifestyles are not optimized for mental wellbeing.  We don’t know how to interact with people the same way we used to.  Mental illness has become trendy.  We’re not taught how to handle our mental health, and therapy isn’t widely accessible enough.

I’m going to go into more detail on all of these things below the cut, and if you want to talk more about any of them, send your thoughts and questions to the inbox!  I’m all ears.

I can only speak for the US, but I think it’s a couple of different things. The first is that mental health issues are more widely discussed, easier to diagnose, and less stigmatized than ever before.  So that means that a lot more people are getting diagnoses and talking about them publicly, whereas before maybe only 10% (I’m making that number up) of people with mental health conditions were diagnosed (and the rest were told that it was a moral failing), and of those people maybe only another fraction were willing to talk about it because it was so stigmatized (see: the moral failing thing).  The criteria for certain mental health issues is also broader than it used to be, and YMMV about whether or not you think that’s a good thing.

I also think that there’s a sort of “collective trauma” that comes with news of horrible things happening all over the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  For a lot of young people in the US, the September 11 attacks were our first real introduction to how terrible the world can be.  And those video clips were played over and over and over again, and I personally think that for children who can’t comprehend that it was a video being replayed (instead of the same thing happening again and again), I think that can be very traumatic.  Additionally, I think it felt like a very personal attack because the victims were civilians, and in our child brains, we latched onto the idea that this could happen to us. And from there we kept seeing images of things that we have no control over and can do nothing about.  

It used to be that the news you would get was mostly local, with some national news thrown in.  Local issues are things that you have power over changing.  You think there needs to be a stop sign at the intersection near your house?  Great!  Go talk to city hall about it.  But now, the news we get is from all over the world, and it all feels like our problem that we should be addressing, even if we have no way to do it.  Now the stop sign down the street and police violence in the closest major city and government scandals and genocide and refugees and chemical weapons and famine are all our problem, but we really only have control over one of those things.  So I think the powerlessness in the face of presumed responsibility causes a lot of anxiety as well.  There’s also a lot more fearmongering on the news and a sense that the world is going to end any day now that there wasn’t before.  For example, a lot of us were probably raised with “stranger danger” and “DARE” programs that make the world seem like a very scary place.  In actuality, a lot of things are getting better- but that makes for a very boring news hour.

Then there’s access to information outside of just news. The more information becomes widely available and easy to access, the more curtains get pulled back on the ineffectual or downright shady way things are often run.  In the past, you would just go to the store and buy what you wanted.  But now, there are lots of things we know we should be considering- are the chickens that laid these eggs tortured?  Were my clothes made my slave labor?  How much water am I wasting every time I get in the shower?  Again, I think it’s a crisis of responsibility, but this time it’s the feeling that if we don’t act responsibly, the world is going to end or we’re terribly immoral people.  Again, it’s that there’s too much to be responsible for and a feeling that we’re never doing enough or never doing it right.  And then I think there are a lot of catch-22s within that, where if you do something to fix one problem you’re creating another that’s just as bad.  And then the small things you can do feel fruitless, because climate change is still happening, companies still use child labor and people still eat animals.  So there’s a crisis of choice as well- there are too many options and it’s hard to know if you’ve picked the right one, especially when you’re constantly exposed to so many other people who are happy that they picked the other choice.  This applies to products and trying to be ethical but it’s also where FOMO comes from, and I think in any form the idea that we’re “missing out” causes stress.  On the topic of FOMO, there’s also the issue of social media.  Social media allows us to compare what we know about ourselves- all the messy, boring, human things- with an idealized version of everyone else, and that comparison can be damaging to self esteem.

Beyond that you have the world we were born into and the ways a lot of GenXers parented their children.  Again, we were given the idea of choice- you’re capable of doing anything you set your mind to.  Previously, your options for the future were sort of limited by a lot of outside factors.  But the idea that we could do anything is essentially a lie, because our future options are still mitigated by outside factors.  So there’s this personal responsibility assigned to the individual to be whatever they want, even when the reality is they can’t do that thing.  They just need to work harder.  I think this is where you can also talk about helicopter parents and the expectations that are put on children, but lots of people cleverer than I have written about that at length so I’m going to skip it.  The TL;DR of that is basically “helicopter parents are stressful,, didn’t teach us how to cope with failure, and children need rest time, not to be pressured into doing activities 24-7”.  Then there’s an expectation that we should be doing better than our parents- that we should go to college, get a job, and buy a house, and start a family by our mid twenties, but obviously with the student debt crisis, oversaturated job market, and various expenses our parents didn’t have to pay for, that’s not really a possibility.  But again, we’ve internalized this belief that it’s our fault and not the fault of the system.

There are also lifestyle issues that fit into this as well.  We have more access to calorically-dense, unhealthy food than ever before, and we move less.  We spend a lot of time in spaces that aren’t optimized for human happiness, and we’re expected to work (or attend school) on a schedule that’s not optimal, either.  On average, we don’t get enough sleep or take care of our health the way we should.  We don’t get enough downtime.  We don’t get enough face-to-face interaction with friends and family, and a lot of our socializing happens virtually, and many people live alone.  Humans are inherently social creatures, and isolation becomes a problem very quickly.  I think we’ve started having difficulty knowing how to interact with others the “right” way, especially now that the social scripts and expectations that used to be followed are no longer.  I think there’s a simultaneous anxiety about offending people or saying the wrong thing coupled with not knowing what the social script we’re meant to follow is.

I also think a smaller factor is how mental illness has become trendy and almost a badge of honor in some sections of the internet, especially among teenagers. This is something along the lines of “school is stressful so I totally have anxiety disorder just like Zoella”.  I think part of it is wanting an explanation to complex feelings besides “being a teenager sucks” and part of it is wanting to be like the people we look up to.  Either way, that might be why you’re hearing about mental illness more as well.  It’s a trendy topic for public figures to discuss because it makes them “accessible”, “real”, and “brave” and gives the illusion of depth, and then the people who look up to them want those traits as well.

And then I think the last thing is that mental health isn’t being treated, and we’re not taught how to interact with our mental health or manage it.  Getting a therapist in the US is difficult, and a lot of the ways that we’re traditionally taught to cope with stress, anxiety, or feelings of sadness are maladaptive.

[prokopetz]

I have an idea for a campaign inspired by American gods by Neil Gaiman. The players would be everyday people unexpectedly chosen as champions of various mythological gods. They are going on a cross continental road trip to start a new age of heroes by reenacting the myth of Gilgamesh. Any recommendations for a system to use?

That’s a tricky one - I know exactly what I’d recommend there, but the trouble is, it isn’t out yet!

Unknown Armies 3rd Edition

It’s been jokingly described as “Cosmic Bumfights: The RPG”, and that’s honestly not too far off the mark. It’s basically a game about very low-rent player characters getting involved in very high-stakes occult shenanigans. The archetypal Unknown Armies player characters are just random people who’ve unwittingly stumbled upon the mysteries of the Occult Underground, and are now slowly, painfully coming to grips with the fact that the world is a lot weirder than they thought - and the system really focuses in on that transition with its core mechanics.

The core system revolves around traits called Shock Meters, which divide traumatic experiences into five categories: Helplessness, Self, Isolation, Unnatural and Violence. Getting whammied in one of those categories can either mark down failed notches (which represent maladaptive trauma responses) or hardened notches (which represent becoming inured to that particular trauma). Your skills are directly tied to your Shock Meters; for example, getting hardened to Violence benefits your hand-to-hand combat skills, but it also impairs your social skills, because being on guard all the time hinders your ability to make emotional connections.

There are several different magic systems layered on top of that, from ritual magic (what it says on the tin) to Adepts (people who are so committed to an alternative worldview that they can force the universe to play by their rules) to Avatars - and it’s the last one that’s a good fit for your particular premise. Avatars are folks who gain supernatural powers by adhering to particular cultural archetypes, basically assuming the mythic attributes of a particular role by playing it so well that even the universe buys their performance.

The game’s actually complete, but the PDF version was only released to Kickstarter backers last month - no ETA on public availability yet. I’ll reblog this post with an update when that happens, though.

(You’ll notice that I specified the 3rd Edition. There is a 2nd Edition, of course, but I’d really recommend waiting rather than picking up the older version. Not only is the setting material generally dated, but it’s got a fair bit of late 1990s, early 2000s edginess in it that just hasn’t aged well. Particularly when it comes to gender and sexuality; like, there’s a whole flavour of magic based on the idea that being trans or nonbinary is a transgression against the natural order of the cosmos. Lots of emphasis on performing magic via self-harm, too - that’s also been dialed way back in the 3rd Edition.)

EDIT: You’ve probably noticed that there are a lot of folks in the notes recommending Scion, and with respect, I’m going to disagree. Scion isn’t a bad game in principle (provided you’re willing to work around certain conspicuous mechanical quirks), but its thematics and power level are hilariously wrong for doing anything in the mode of American Gods. Like, literally the only thing they have in common is being a modern setting with gods in.

[otonastick]

Grounding, Mindfulness, and Trauma / Chronic Stress: OT Connections

It will have been officially 3 months at my new job on Tuesday and the amount of learning I’ve done will be worth multiple blog posts. I’d like to make this one about some patterns and observations I’ve noticed in regards to mental health and trauma, and the true benefits of grounding and mindfulness that up until now, even I didn’t fully believe in.

People who were in my OT class at McMaster of 2016 may humorously recall a specific lecture in which a guest lecturer came to talk about trauma and grounding techniques. Unfortunately, it was more awkward than informative based on her pretending to be a traumatized client and having the class ask her questions to assess and treat her as “one” therapist.. I also remember another lecture on mindfulness which, however well intentioned, also failed because the activity of trying to be mindful in class just did. not. work. 

To be fair, I think mindfulness, grounding, and therapy in general can really only work when you’re fully open to it and letting go of how silly it can seem. On the other hand, I think it’s the responsibility of the teachers to engage their students and show them how it’s not silly. Anyway... /shade.

Fast forward to now. I’ve learned so much more about how powerful grounding and mindfulness can really be not only for clients, but for myself.

When I was younger, I used to become so immersed in certain things I was doing - for example, playing with my toy ponies (lol) or drawing, or making up stories in my imagination about anything in particular. There was a specific summer before 5th grade that I recall that I spent literally day in and day out indoors, as an only child. In the present, nothing would seem more boring or mind numbing than being alone at home now. But back then, time would pass without me even knowing it, and I remember doing things like creating board games out of cardboard boxes (the Trash Game)! and going on random online chat rooms to tell anonymous strangers that I thought South Park and the Simpsons were “evil” cartoons... (LOL)

Why was it so different? How could I have been so focused and in the zone, whereas now I find it hard to even focus on anything for longer than an hour at most... ? 

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that as we grow older, life becomes more concentrated on what we need to do to plan for the future as well as what we could have done better in the past... We stop being able to fully enjoy life as it is in the moment. Those times when I was experiencing the concept of flow was so soothing, so peaceful.. and now I rarely ever experience a full sense of peace. I can only speak for myself, but I am willing to bet this isn’t uncommon.

What does this have to to with trauma? .. A whole lot. Bear with me.

My first important point however, is that trauma can be different for different people, and what is traumatic for one person may not be for another. Additionally, I like thinking of trauma simply as a severe and/or chronic stressor. Stress releases certain chemicals in the body (cortisol, adrenaline, etc) and activates certain automatic responses in our bodies (sympathetic fight-flight-freeze systems)

Additionally, when I explain trauma to clients, I say that it’s any negative event that occurs to someone that they’re not prepared for, couldn’t control, and didn’t/don’t have the resources or tools to deal with. In this sense, the trauma gets lodged in our brains and in our bodies, and we essentially become “stuck” in that moment. I believe this causes a disconnect between ever being able to truly experience the present moment in life again because we are a) rewinding that traumatic event(s)/moment(s) as it has not been properly processed and b) attempting to prepare for negativity in the future because we have experienced it and therefore expect it (especially if the stressors are early and in childhood). This is the root of anxiety, depression, etc. Anxiety is adaptive as it helps us to plan for factual and realistic threats in the environment. However, it becomes maladaptive when that anxiety becomes so generalized that it extends to any and all potential future activities.

So essentially, if we see trauma / stress on a spectrum -- everyone has stress, but the people who have higher and more chronic levels of that stress are higher on the spectrum -- we can see how those with more negative childhood / early / ongoing experiences will have increased levels of mental health concerns. What people call “mental illness” is often truly in my opinion, just a way of coping that helped people survive negative conditions that are now maladaptive because they no longer apply/work for the present. From my limited clinical observation thus far, I see that much of these issues seem to have one thing in common - not being able to be present and live in the moment anymore. Not being able to feel safe. For those working in the trauma field, this is pretty obvious as there are 3 stages of trauma recovery:

1. Safety and stabilization

2. Mourning/processing the trauma

3. Re-connection

As an occupational therapist, I see it this way: We are never fully “being” or “doing” our activities / occupations anymore. We are ruminating, we are preparing for the worst, we are hopeless because this is what we’ve already experienced. 

To be more specific -- let’s take the case of a child who has been through 8 foster homes and experienced abuse/neglect in most, if not all of them. How exactly are we to expect this person to ever feel safe enough to truly enjoy what they are doing in the moment anymore? In their world, something scary could happen at any point. This brings us to grounding and mindfulness.

Grounding is particularly useful for people who experience intrusiveness (flashbacks). Grounding is what it sounds like. It’s re-connecting to the present world again and re-training your brain to remember that you’re safe, you're in the moment, and you’re not back in the past again. For example -- Senses grounding (54321):

Name 5 things you see. Name 4 things you hear. Name 3 things you feel around you (physically). Name 2 things you like the taste/smell of. Name 1 positive thing about yourself / affirmative statement.

It seems like the most simple technique but after seeing it in person work so effectively for clients, I am a true believer now. This was exactly what this past guest lecturer tried to teach us at McMaster and what I completely wrote off and didn’t understand. And that’s just the beginning - the variety of grounding techniques are long, but the main similarity is the concentration on the here and now.

What is the difference between mindfulness and grounding? This is something that I also struggled with initially. Now, I understand that grounding is more of a distraction, an immediate remedy to extreme negative emotional states by focusing on what’s around you and what you are able to pick up on with your 5 senses. Mindfulness, to me, is an extension of grounding. It is living in the moment but beyond that, it is a) simultaneously stepping away from the moment to see reality as it is, as well as b) throwing yourself into the moment and participating in it. What I didn’t like before about descriptions of mindfulness was the simplicity and the constant focus on breathing without a deeper explanation that mindfulness is not always accessible to some people through breathing, but rather through simple participation in activities (occupation!)

What really hit me the hardest and made the most sense was DBT’s description of mindfulness. Mindfulness is broken up into 3 skill components: Observing, Describing, and Participating. 

Observing is simply watching the world and everything in it, including your own thoughts and emotions, pass by, without judgment and without labelling. This is probably the most difficult concept for me to practice myself.

Describing is putting a factual explanation on what is happening, but again without judgment. This is very helpful for people who tend to mind read and interpret innocuous things as potentially negative (especially due to prior trauma). So for example, if someone tells you last minute that they can’t come to your birthday because of X reason after they had previously confirmed, you might immediately feel hurt/angry. You might mindlessly jump to a judgment - “they are cancelling because they don’t care enough about me”. If you were to use the skill of simply describing the facts, you would step back from your anger/hurt and realize there may be no evidence for your judgment. I also found it interesting that in the DBT training skills manual, it states that research has shown that labelling emotions actually helps to regulate them. How many times have we not really taken the time to pick apart all the mess of emotions we feel, but simply surrender to them? 

Participating is my favourite. I think as an occupational therapist, it makes the most sense, and again, according to the DBT manual, is actually the highest goal of mindfulness! It’s not just breathing, damn it, it’s being present, and participating! I think my own personal experience that many people can relate to is feeling awkward and self conscious in new social situations. For example - talking to strangers at parties, or dancing around other people at shows/events. Anxiety is being in our heads, wondering what people are thinking when we will never know. I made the recent decision to try my hardest to let go of that and simply enjoy what I’m doing and fight against any anxiety. It feels great.. after the few seconds of “I feel so weird, I must look weird... God, are people judging me?” Now I try to let go of predicting how I might feel if I go anywhere or talk with anyone and simply go in with openness. It usually turns out much better than I thought not because of any real reason about the event/person itself.. but rather that I stayed present, let go of judgment, and simply just participated.

Sorry.. went a little off topic there... 

So what’s my end point? I think that occupational therapists definitely need to realize that grounding and stabilization comes first before any attempt to resume daily activities. I’ve made that mistake. However, daily activities and leisure can be used as CONDUITS to grounding, depending on what the person personally prefers. Then, grounding is used as a segue to mindful practice. For example, a client may love stitching or colouring, and that can ground them to the present moment and distract from the negativity in their world. Over time, and with increased feelings of safety, traumatic memories can be addressed and not avoided/suppressed anymore. Processing can be completed using a mindful approach - going back to observing and describing what happened then, what is happening now, and how one’s cognitive belief systems have come skewed because one is still expecting the past to bleed into the present. Then, allowing yourself to participate fully in what’s going on now will lead to more positive experiences and a brain that can heal, and hope for the future.

[watsonrodriquezie]

ACEs and Primal Health

It’s fair to say that I gravitate towards tangible, actionable subject matter when it comes to improving my own and others’ health. Things like nutrition, fitness, sleep, hormonal responses, and supplement science may seem like a lot to chew on for the layperson, but these are my personal passions as well as my long-time profession.

And while these are certainly the big, actionable players in the game of health, I fully acknowledge there may be more lurking behind the scenes than we realize. A body that refuses to heal no matter how Primal you eat. Stubborn health conditions that simply refuse to fully go away, despite all the changes you make in your life. A propensity for disease that defies everything you’ve learned about ancestral nutrition and wellness. An intriguing new angle in the health sphere suggests the hurdle for some people may be embedded deeper than outer changes can access. 

What Are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)?

Oddly enough, it all began with a weight loss program. Working out of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, Dr. Vincent Felitti was on a mission to get to the bottom of obesity. The problem was, the patients in his program kept dropping out, and he had no idea why. After a series of rather awkward and unintended questions, an interview with one obese woman provided the answer: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

It turned out that the woman had been sexually abused as a kid, and her weight gain was a way of disappearing; of minimizing her risk of further sexual assault. Felitti dug deeper, and discovered that of the hundreds in his weight loss program, at least half of his patients had suffered from some form of ACE. What those people had experienced in their childhoods was somehow systematically preventing them from losing weight. If they did manage to lose weight, they regained all of it in short order.

The findings couldn’t be ignored, and Felitti soon teamed up with Dr. Robert Anda from the CDC to delve deeper. Beginning in 1995 and running until 1997, the resulting ACE study was one of the largest of its kind, encompassing a whopping 17,000+ participants. What Felitti and Anda found not only verified the earlier links between obesity and ACEs, but amplified them exponentially. Adverse Childhood Experiences were a pivotal factor for many of the most common major diseases and health conditions of our time.

The findings were simple yet far-reaching. Through the use of an uncomplicated questionnaire and scoring system, each participant was assigned an ACE score. Each traumatic experience during their childhood would give them a point, with more adverse experiences equating to a higher score. These experiences included sexual, verbal and physical abuse, five forms of family dysfunction (alcoholism, violence, incarceration, divorce, or abandonment), and 2 forms of neglect. Someone who had been verbally abused and had an alcoholic mother, for example, would get an ACE of 2. Those fortunate souls without any adverse experiences sailed through the survey with 0.

How ACEs Affect Our Health

Our heroes at Kaiser Permanente found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the higher the ACE score, the greater the propensity for certain diseases. But it was the extent to which those ACEs affected the health of participants that had me doing a double take. Compared with people who achieved an ACE score of 0, those who ticked 4 ACE boxes were found to be at a 240% greater risk of hepatitis, and a 390% higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As the score went up, Felitti and Anda noted that people were more prone to violence, more broken marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more auto-immune disease. Thanks a lot, childhood.

As Felitti and a host of other researchers dug deeper in the following years, the picture became even more ominous. In short order, a higher ACE score was linked to greater risk of ischemic heart disease, chronic and frequent headaches, lung cancer and other forms of cancer, and liver disease. Whichever disease or health condition researchers homed in on, inevitably a link was found to Adverse Childhood Experiences. More “minor” but broadly influential conditions like sleep disturbance corresponded with ACEs as well with those people who had an ACE score of 5 or more being up to 2.4 times more likely to have trouble falling or staying asleep. As the ACE count went down, the sleep quality slowly improved.

Taking a step back, it became apparent that ACEs were impacting all areas of health. People with an ACE score of 5 or more had a nearly threefold increase in rates of psychotropic drug subscriptions, while a 2009 study conducted by Felitti and company found that risk of autoimmune disease in general went up significantly with increasing adverse experiences during the childhood or teen years. Breaking it down, they demonstrated that an ACE score at or above 2 meant a 70% increased risk of idiopathic myocarditis (a cardiovascular disease), 80% greater risk for myasthenia gravis (a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease), and 100% increased risk for rheumatic diseases. I don’t like those odds.

The ACE Pyramid

As Felitti and his team began to piece together the links between current-day health and past adverse experiences, a certain trend started to emerge. That trend is as follows:

Adverse childhood experiences

Disrupted neurodevelopment

Social, emotion and cognitive impairment

Adoption of health-risk behaviors

Disease, disability and social problems

Early death

It looks like a decidedly morbid take on something that happened many years ago during childhood, but if the numbers are anything to go by it’s a very accurate synopsis. This progression, known as the ACE Pyramid, was observed and documented in thousands upon thousands of people.

Demographically speaking, in the original study of 17,000 participants, nearly 75% were white. Almost 40% had a college or graduate degree. Another 36% had some college.

In a 2009 commentary posted in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics, the Godfather (aka Felitti) himself noted that the pathway from ACE to early death isn’t always linear. ACEs can work their destructive ways via two feedbacks: first, disease and early death is the consequence of various trauma-coping mechanisms like smoking, overeating and drug use. In this scenario, the maladaptive behavior brought on by the trauma of childhood could lead to excessive eating and poor diet, for example, which then leads to type 2 diabetes, the culmination of which is coronary artery disease.

Second, chronic stress generated by the trauma (and the brain’s inability to let go of the incident) directly leads to impairment of immunity and chronically elevated inflammation, which in turn paves the way for disease. Even worse, both of these mechanisms can work in tandem, further sealing the fate of the person in their grip.

The Neurobiological Role of Trauma

Where things get interesting indeed is with regards to neurobiology. The trauma of Adverse Childhood Experiences can literally rewire and re-form the brain, changing the way a person develops neurologically for the rest of his/her life. As this study noted, “the risk of every outcome in the affective, somatic, substance abuse, memory, sexual, and aggression-related domains [of the brain] increased in a graded fashion as the ACE score increased.” The result of a single ACE, then, could be permanent impairment of multiple brain structures and functions. 

Put simply, the stress of a traumatic childhood event, such as being beaten or constantly belittled, releases hormones that physically damage a child’s developing brain. These children live their lives in a constant state of fight or flight, as the brain begins to perceive everyday places and situations as potentially dangerous. Thus, an adaptation to danger becomes a maladaptation in its permanency. 

With the world either promising danger around every corner or heaping guilt on the developing child, they begin to find solace in diversions. Food, alcohol, drugs, sex, high-risk sports—anything to get their minds off the trauma that is set on rerun in the back of their minds. 

But while this is easy to compute in theory, it’s much harder to diagnose in practice. A neurobiological response to an ACE may remain dormant for years, perhaps not even emerging until much later on in a person’s adult life. A triggering event or phase hits, and latent dysfunction goes haywire, developing into mental illness or morbid obesity, or ruining their marriage (take your pick). So, was it really a midlife crisis gone horribly wrong, or an ACE finally rearing its ugly head?

Add to this the fact that trauma, like many factors, interacts with genetic susceptibility, and we’ve got a very confusing picture indeed. Two people in the same household can go through the exact same experiences but be affected in very different ways, depending on an innate dimension of resilience.

It’s generally assumed that neurobiological markers for PTSD are acquired following a traumatic event. What researchers are finding, however, is that certain PTSD symptoms in a patient may in fact represent pre-existing “upstream” pathological functions that remain dormant until released by trauma. Meaning some of us were hard-wired for obesity, but just needed a supremely unpleasant event to unlock that unhealthy potential.

The Far-Reaching Significance of ACEs 

Rather than trying too hard to convince you why these findings are so important, I’ll refer you to Nadine Burke Harris and her excellent TED Talk. She paints a vivid picture from a practitioner’s perspective, explaining that ACEs essentially provide the missing link to solving head-scratching health cases in many patients.

But if we’re looking for cold, hard facts, it’s hard to ignore the economic viability of integrating ACEs into healthcare. According to a CDC study published in 2012, a single year of trauma during childhood can add up to $124 billion in costs over the lifetime of those children. Of those costs, healthcare and productivity loses account for the lion’s share. If recognizing and treating ACEs could cut those costs by even a quarter, we’re talking astronomical savings down the line.

But what’s the entry point for action here? 

In this case, I’d say it starts with knowledge as power—recognition, self-reflection, and support as needed. Just because someone is consciously healthy now, doesn’t mean they’re living their best life. It doesn’t mean they’re immune to the effects of any latent traumatic childhood events they’ve been unwittingly carrying around. These factors might be responsible for any number of unexplainable things that have and continue to happen in a person’s life, including stubborn health anomalies.

For this reason, the true importance of ACEs lies with you. Recognizing any ACE influence from your own history can provide Burke’s missing link for your own self-diagnosis, enabling you to direct your healing inwards, finally accessing the potential undercurrent of chronic stress and correcting coping behaviors that have been set on repeat. Maybe a strong innate resilience protected you from lasting effects. Maybe that isn’t the case. Unpacking the question may just open up the possibility for a better life, and improved long-term health.

Using ACEs to Heal

It might seem a bit cliche, but recognizing that you might be harboring a traumatic event or experience from your childhood can be an incredibly productive, even “freeing” step. There’s plenty of people within the Primal community who have had to work ridiculously hard to get their health back on track—harder than the average person should have to work, it seems. They might occasionally wonder why eating this way or living that way promotes healing in others but doesn’t have any effect on them, or why they always seem to gain weight with but the slightest of dietary tweaks. Or why the penchant for self-sabotage is so powerful….

With this in mind, maybe you’d be interested in taking the quiz. It’ll force you to cast your mind back and analyze your childhood from an objective viewpoint, highlighting experiences that you might formerly have brushed over. Take it seriously—this might just change your life.

The amygdala part of your brain can be relaxed, the hippocampus can restore proper memory function, and the nervous system can rewire itself back to a semblance of normalcy. Ever-present stress can be banished, and widespread inflammation can dissipate.

There’s also a link between gut dysbiosis and stress, and even a single traumatic event can shift your micro biome. We’re familiar with this by now, and recognize a that a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy intestinal lining is critical to both physical and mental health. Use this knowledge—it’s a powerful weapon against PTSD and other accumulated symptoms from buried ACEs.

But this is just the start. Your pathway will need to be one of calm consideration and deep inflection. If you’re like me, that prospect will be a mildly frustrating one, but it is what it is. Here’s a quick set of suggestions for moving through it.

Write it down. Writing about traumatic or emotional events in one’s life has been directly correlated to improvements in both physical and psychological health. Studies generally indicate that 20 minutes a day is a good amount for this kind of traumatic digging. Examine the event(s) from every angle. It’s up to you what you do with the writing afterwards, but burning it is always cleansing (provided you don’t burn the house down in the process)

Practice mindfulness meditation. Time and again we keep coming back to meditation as a form of mental rewiring, and it’s not without reason. The research is there to back it up time and again.

Find a skilled therapist. Sharing your experience with an impartial third party can help you to find resolution, along with acceptance of a past you can’t change. There’s no reason this should be work you make yourself do alone. Community heals. The right therapist might be part of the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.

Look to embodied therapies. Top experts in the field of trauma consider this the new standard for healing because effective embodiment therapies uniquely access parts of the brain most severely distorted by trauma. This could include (particularly trauma-sensitive) yoga (which in one study offered more sustainable resolution to trauma than talk therapy did).

Final Thoughts…

Developments in ACEs represent one of the rare forays of “mainstream” medical thinking into something resembling a more holistic, less reactive style of healthcare. Clearly, it’s only one small offshoot, and as the CDC has virtually cut all funding to this area of research it’s got many roadblocks ahead of it, but it shows some serious promise.

More importantly, it forces us to examine our history in a different light. We are the culmination of a lifetime of experiences, and not all of those experiences are positive. A Primal approach to health should be open-minded and even fearless. In treading where we’re wary to go, we may discover the circumstances that got us stuck in the first place. Loosening old burdens means a freer life and more expansive health. 

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Take care.

[milenasanchezmk]

ACEs and Primal Health

It’s fair to say that I gravitate towards tangible, actionable subject matter when it comes to improving my own and others’ health. Things like nutrition, fitness, sleep, hormonal responses, and supplement science may seem like a lot to chew on for the layperson, but these are my personal passions as well as my long-time profession.

And while these are certainly the big, actionable players in the game of health, I fully acknowledge there may be more lurking behind the scenes than we realize. A body that refuses to heal no matter how Primal you eat. Stubborn health conditions that simply refuse to fully go away, despite all the changes you make in your life. A propensity for disease that defies everything you’ve learned about ancestral nutrition and wellness. An intriguing new angle in the health sphere suggests the hurdle for some people may be embedded deeper than outer changes can access. 

What Are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)?

Oddly enough, it all began with a weight loss program. Working out of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, Dr. Vincent Felitti was on a mission to get to the bottom of obesity. The problem was, the patients in his program kept dropping out, and he had no idea why. After a series of rather awkward and unintended questions, an interview with one obese woman provided the answer: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

It turned out that the woman had been sexually abused as a kid, and her weight gain was a way of disappearing; of minimizing her risk of further sexual assault. Felitti dug deeper, and discovered that of the hundreds in his weight loss program, at least half of his patients had suffered from some form of ACE. What those people had experienced in their childhoods was somehow systematically preventing them from losing weight. If they did manage to lose weight, they regained all of it in short order.

The findings couldn’t be ignored, and Felitti soon teamed up with Dr. Robert Anda from the CDC to delve deeper. Beginning in 1995 and running until 1997, the resulting ACE study was one of the largest of its kind, encompassing a whopping 17,000+ participants. What Felitti and Anda found not only verified the earlier links between obesity and ACEs, but amplified them exponentially. Adverse Childhood Experiences were a pivotal factor for many of the most common major diseases and health conditions of our time.

The findings were simple yet far-reaching. Through the use of an uncomplicated questionnaire and scoring system, each participant was assigned an ACE score. Each traumatic experience during their childhood would give them a point, with more adverse experiences equating to a higher score. These experiences included sexual, verbal and physical abuse, five forms of family dysfunction (alcoholism, violence, incarceration, divorce, or abandonment), and 2 forms of neglect. Someone who had been verbally abused and had an alcoholic mother, for example, would get an ACE of 2. Those fortunate souls without any adverse experiences sailed through the survey with 0.

How ACEs Affect Our Health

Our heroes at Kaiser Permanente found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the higher the ACE score, the greater the propensity for certain diseases. But it was the extent to which those ACEs affected the health of participants that had me doing a double take. Compared with people who achieved an ACE score of 0, those who ticked 4 ACE boxes were found to be at a 240% greater risk of hepatitis, and a 390% higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As the score went up, Felitti and Anda noted that people were more prone to violence, more broken marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more auto-immune disease. Thanks a lot, childhood.

As Felitti and a host of other researchers dug deeper in the following years, the picture became even more ominous. In short order, a higher ACE score was linked to greater risk of ischemic heart disease, chronic and frequent headaches, lung cancer and other forms of cancer, and liver disease. Whichever disease or health condition researchers homed in on, inevitably a link was found to Adverse Childhood Experiences. More “minor” but broadly influential conditions like sleep disturbance corresponded with ACEs as well with those people who had an ACE score of 5 or more being up to 2.4 times more likely to have trouble falling or staying asleep. As the ACE count went down, the sleep quality slowly improved.

Taking a step back, it became apparent that ACEs were impacting all areas of health. People with an ACE score of 5 or more had a nearly threefold increase in rates of psychotropic drug subscriptions, while a 2009 study conducted by Felitti and company found that risk of autoimmune disease in general went up significantly with increasing adverse experiences during the childhood or teen years. Breaking it down, they demonstrated that an ACE score at or above 2 meant a 70% increased risk of idiopathic myocarditis (a cardiovascular disease), 80% greater risk for myasthenia gravis (a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease), and 100% increased risk for rheumatic diseases. I don’t like those odds.

The ACE Pyramid

As Felitti and his team began to piece together the links between current-day health and past adverse experiences, a certain trend started to emerge. That trend is as follows:

Adverse childhood experiences

Disrupted neurodevelopment

Social, emotion and cognitive impairment

Adoption of health-risk behaviors

Disease, disability and social problems

Early death

It looks like a decidedly morbid take on something that happened many years ago during childhood, but if the numbers are anything to go by it’s a very accurate synopsis. This progression, known as the ACE Pyramid, was observed and documented in thousands upon thousands of people.

Demographically speaking, in the original study of 17,000 participants, nearly 75% were white. Almost 40% had a college or graduate degree. Another 36% had some college.

In a 2009 commentary posted in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics, the Godfather (aka Felitti) himself noted that the pathway from ACE to early death isn’t always linear. ACEs can work their destructive ways via two feedbacks: first, disease and early death is the consequence of various trauma-coping mechanisms like smoking, overeating and drug use. In this scenario, the maladaptive behavior brought on by the trauma of childhood could lead to excessive eating and poor diet, for example, which then leads to type 2 diabetes, the culmination of which is coronary artery disease.

Second, chronic stress generated by the trauma (and the brain’s inability to let go of the incident) directly leads to impairment of immunity and chronically elevated inflammation, which in turn paves the way for disease. Even worse, both of these mechanisms can work in tandem, further sealing the fate of the person in their grip.

The Neurobiological Role of Trauma

Where things get interesting indeed is with regards to neurobiology. The trauma of Adverse Childhood Experiences can literally rewire and re-form the brain, changing the way a person develops neurologically for the rest of his/her life. As this study noted, “the risk of every outcome in the affective, somatic, substance abuse, memory, sexual, and aggression-related domains [of the brain] increased in a graded fashion as the ACE score increased.” The result of a single ACE, then, could be permanent impairment of multiple brain structures and functions. 

Put simply, the stress of a traumatic childhood event, such as being beaten or constantly belittled, releases hormones that physically damage a child’s developing brain. These children live their lives in a constant state of fight or flight, as the brain begins to perceive everyday places and situations as potentially dangerous. Thus, an adaptation to danger becomes a maladaptation in its permanency. 

With the world either promising danger around every corner or heaping guilt on the developing child, they begin to find solace in diversions. Food, alcohol, drugs, sex, high-risk sports—anything to get their minds off the trauma that is set on rerun in the back of their minds. 

But while this is easy to compute in theory, it’s much harder to diagnose in practice. A neurobiological response to an ACE may remain dormant for years, perhaps not even emerging until much later on in a person’s adult life. A triggering event or phase hits, and latent dysfunction goes haywire, developing into mental illness or morbid obesity, or ruining their marriage (take your pick). So, was it really a midlife crisis gone horribly wrong, or an ACE finally rearing its ugly head?

Add to this the fact that trauma, like many factors, interacts with genetic susceptibility, and we’ve got a very confusing picture indeed. Two people in the same household can go through the exact same experiences but be affected in very different ways, depending on an innate dimension of resilience.

It’s generally assumed that neurobiological markers for PTSD are acquired following a traumatic event. What researchers are finding, however, is that certain PTSD symptoms in a patient may in fact represent pre-existing “upstream” pathological functions that remain dormant until released by trauma. Meaning some of us were hard-wired for obesity, but just needed a supremely unpleasant event to unlock that unhealthy potential.

The Far-Reaching Significance of ACEs 

Rather than trying too hard to convince you why these findings are so important, I’ll refer you to Nadine Burke Harris and her excellent TED Talk. She paints a vivid picture from a practitioner’s perspective, explaining that ACEs essentially provide the missing link to solving head-scratching health cases in many patients.

But if we’re looking for cold, hard facts, it’s hard to ignore the economic viability of integrating ACEs into healthcare. According to a CDC study published in 2012, a single year of trauma during childhood can add up to $124 billion in costs over the lifetime of those children. Of those costs, healthcare and productivity loses account for the lion’s share. If recognizing and treating ACEs could cut those costs by even a quarter, we’re talking astronomical savings down the line.

But what’s the entry point for action here? 

In this case, I’d say it starts with knowledge as power—recognition, self-reflection, and support as needed. Just because someone is consciously healthy now, doesn’t mean they’re living their best life. It doesn’t mean they’re immune to the effects of any latent traumatic childhood events they’ve been unwittingly carrying around. These factors might be responsible for any number of unexplainable things that have and continue to happen in a person’s life, including stubborn health anomalies.

For this reason, the true importance of ACEs lies with you. Recognizing any ACE influence from your own history can provide Burke’s missing link for your own self-diagnosis, enabling you to direct your healing inwards, finally accessing the potential undercurrent of chronic stress and correcting coping behaviors that have been set on repeat. Maybe a strong innate resilience protected you from lasting effects. Maybe that isn’t the case. Unpacking the question may just open up the possibility for a better life, and improved long-term health.

Using ACEs to Heal

It might seem a bit cliche, but recognizing that you might be harboring a traumatic event or experience from your childhood can be an incredibly productive, even “freeing” step. There’s plenty of people within the Primal community who have had to work ridiculously hard to get their health back on track—harder than the average person should have to work, it seems. They might occasionally wonder why eating this way or living that way promotes healing in others but doesn’t have any effect on them, or why they always seem to gain weight with but the slightest of dietary tweaks. Or why the penchant for self-sabotage is so powerful….

With this in mind, maybe you’d be interested in taking the quiz. It’ll force you to cast your mind back and analyze your childhood from an objective viewpoint, highlighting experiences that you might formerly have brushed over. Take it seriously—this might just change your life.

The amygdala part of your brain can be relaxed, the hippocampus can restore proper memory function, and the nervous system can rewire itself back to a semblance of normalcy. Ever-present stress can be banished, and widespread inflammation can dissipate.

There’s also a link between gut dysbiosis and stress, and even a single traumatic event can shift your micro biome. We’re familiar with this by now, and recognize a that a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy intestinal lining is critical to both physical and mental health. Use this knowledge—it’s a powerful weapon against PTSD and other accumulated symptoms from buried ACEs.

But this is just the start. Your pathway will need to be one of calm consideration and deep inflection. If you’re like me, that prospect will be a mildly frustrating one, but it is what it is. Here’s a quick set of suggestions for moving through it.

Write it down. Writing about traumatic or emotional events in one’s life has been directly correlated to improvements in both physical and psychological health. Studies generally indicate that 20 minutes a day is a good amount for this kind of traumatic digging. Examine the event(s) from every angle. It’s up to you what you do with the writing afterwards, but burning it is always cleansing (provided you don’t burn the house down in the process)

Practice mindfulness meditation. Time and again we keep coming back to meditation as a form of mental rewiring, and it’s not without reason. The research is there to back it up time and again.

Find a skilled therapist. Sharing your experience with an impartial third party can help you to find resolution, along with acceptance of a past you can’t change. There’s no reason this should be work you make yourself do alone. Community heals. The right therapist might be part of the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.

Look to embodied therapies. Top experts in the field of trauma consider this the new standard for healing because effective embodiment therapies uniquely access parts of the brain most severely distorted by trauma. This could include (particularly trauma-sensitive) yoga (which in one study offered more sustainable resolution to trauma than talk therapy did).

Final Thoughts…

Developments in ACEs represent one of the rare forays of “mainstream” medical thinking into something resembling a more holistic, less reactive style of healthcare. Clearly, it’s only one small offshoot, and as the CDC has virtually cut all funding to this area of research it’s got many roadblocks ahead of it, but it shows some serious promise.

More importantly, it forces us to examine our history in a different light. We are the culmination of a lifetime of experiences, and not all of those experiences are positive. A Primal approach to health should be open-minded and even fearless. In treading where we’re wary to go, we may discover the circumstances that got us stuck in the first place. Loosening old burdens means a freer life and more expansive health. 

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Take care.

[fishermariawo]

ACEs and Primal Health

It’s fair to say that I gravitate towards tangible, actionable subject matter when it comes to improving my own and others’ health. Things like nutrition, fitness, sleep, hormonal responses, and supplement science may seem like a lot to chew on for the layperson, but these are my personal passions as well as my long-time profession.

And while these are certainly the big, actionable players in the game of health, I fully acknowledge there may be more lurking behind the scenes than we realize. A body that refuses to heal no matter how Primal you eat. Stubborn health conditions that simply refuse to fully go away, despite all the changes you make in your life. A propensity for disease that defies everything you’ve learned about ancestral nutrition and wellness. An intriguing new angle in the health sphere suggests the hurdle for some people may be embedded deeper than outer changes can access. 

What Are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)?

Oddly enough, it all began with a weight loss program. Working out of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA, Dr. Vincent Felitti was on a mission to get to the bottom of obesity. The problem was, the patients in his program kept dropping out, and he had no idea why. After a series of rather awkward and unintended questions, an interview with one obese woman provided the answer: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

It turned out that the woman had been sexually abused as a kid, and her weight gain was a way of disappearing; of minimizing her risk of further sexual assault. Felitti dug deeper, and discovered that of the hundreds in his weight loss program, at least half of his patients had suffered from some form of ACE. What those people had experienced in their childhoods was somehow systematically preventing them from losing weight. If they did manage to lose weight, they regained all of it in short order.

The findings couldn’t be ignored, and Felitti soon teamed up with Dr. Robert Anda from the CDC to delve deeper. Beginning in 1995 and running until 1997, the resulting ACE study was one of the largest of its kind, encompassing a whopping 17,000+ participants. What Felitti and Anda found not only verified the earlier links between obesity and ACEs, but amplified them exponentially. Adverse Childhood Experiences were a pivotal factor for many of the most common major diseases and health conditions of our time.

The findings were simple yet far-reaching. Through the use of an uncomplicated questionnaire and scoring system, each participant was assigned an ACE score. Each traumatic experience during their childhood would give them a point, with more adverse experiences equating to a higher score. These experiences included sexual, verbal and physical abuse, five forms of family dysfunction (alcoholism, violence, incarceration, divorce, or abandonment), and 2 forms of neglect. Someone who had been verbally abused and had an alcoholic mother, for example, would get an ACE of 2. Those fortunate souls without any adverse experiences sailed through the survey with 0.

How ACEs Affect Our Health

Our heroes at Kaiser Permanente found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the higher the ACE score, the greater the propensity for certain diseases. But it was the extent to which those ACEs affected the health of participants that had me doing a double take. Compared with people who achieved an ACE score of 0, those who ticked 4 ACE boxes were found to be at a 240% greater risk of hepatitis, and a 390% higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As the score went up, Felitti and Anda noted that people were more prone to violence, more broken marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more auto-immune disease. Thanks a lot, childhood.

As Felitti and a host of other researchers dug deeper in the following years, the picture became even more ominous. In short order, a higher ACE score was linked to greater risk of ischemic heart disease, chronic and frequent headaches, lung cancer and other forms of cancer, and liver disease. Whichever disease or health condition researchers homed in on, inevitably a link was found to Adverse Childhood Experiences. More “minor” but broadly influential conditions like sleep disturbance corresponded with ACEs as well with those people who had an ACE score of 5 or more being up to 2.4 times more likely to have trouble falling or staying asleep. As the ACE count went down, the sleep quality slowly improved.

Taking a step back, it became apparent that ACEs were impacting all areas of health. People with an ACE score of 5 or more had a nearly threefold increase in rates of psychotropic drug subscriptions, while a 2009 study conducted by Felitti and company found that risk of autoimmune disease in general went up significantly with increasing adverse experiences during the childhood or teen years. Breaking it down, they demonstrated that an ACE score at or above 2 meant a 70% increased risk of idiopathic myocarditis (a cardiovascular disease), 80% greater risk for myasthenia gravis (a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease), and 100% increased risk for rheumatic diseases. I don’t like those odds.

The ACE Pyramid

As Felitti and his team began to piece together the links between current-day health and past adverse experiences, a certain trend started to emerge. That trend is as follows:

Adverse childhood experiences

Disrupted neurodevelopment

Social, emotion and cognitive impairment

Adoption of health-risk behaviors

Disease, disability and social problems

Early death

It looks like a decidedly morbid take on something that happened many years ago during childhood, but if the numbers are anything to go by it’s a very accurate synopsis. This progression, known as the ACE Pyramid, was observed and documented in thousands upon thousands of people.

Demographically speaking, in the original study of 17,000 participants, nearly 75% were white. Almost 40% had a college or graduate degree. Another 36% had some college.

In a 2009 commentary posted in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics, the Godfather (aka Felitti) himself noted that the pathway from ACE to early death isn’t always linear. ACEs can work their destructive ways via two feedbacks: first, disease and early death is the consequence of various trauma-coping mechanisms like smoking, overeating and drug use. In this scenario, the maladaptive behavior brought on by the trauma of childhood could lead to excessive eating and poor diet, for example, which then leads to type 2 diabetes, the culmination of which is coronary artery disease.

Second, chronic stress generated by the trauma (and the brain’s inability to let go of the incident) directly leads to impairment of immunity and chronically elevated inflammation, which in turn paves the way for disease. Even worse, both of these mechanisms can work in tandem, further sealing the fate of the person in their grip.

The Neurobiological Role of Trauma

Where things get interesting indeed is with regards to neurobiology. The trauma of Adverse Childhood Experiences can literally rewire and re-form the brain, changing the way a person develops neurologically for the rest of his/her life. As this study noted, “the risk of every outcome in the affective, somatic, substance abuse, memory, sexual, and aggression-related domains [of the brain] increased in a graded fashion as the ACE score increased.” The result of a single ACE, then, could be permanent impairment of multiple brain structures and functions. 

Put simply, the stress of a traumatic childhood event, such as being beaten or constantly belittled, releases hormones that physically damage a child’s developing brain. These children live their lives in a constant state of fight or flight, as the brain begins to perceive everyday places and situations as potentially dangerous. Thus, an adaptation to danger becomes a maladaptation in its permanency. 

With the world either promising danger around every corner or heaping guilt on the developing child, they begin to find solace in diversions. Food, alcohol, drugs, sex, high-risk sports—anything to get their minds off the trauma that is set on rerun in the back of their minds. 

But while this is easy to compute in theory, it’s much harder to diagnose in practice. A neurobiological response to an ACE may remain dormant for years, perhaps not even emerging until much later on in a person’s adult life. A triggering event or phase hits, and latent dysfunction goes haywire, developing into mental illness or morbid obesity, or ruining their marriage (take your pick). So, was it really a midlife crisis gone horribly wrong, or an ACE finally rearing its ugly head?

Add to this the fact that trauma, like many factors, interacts with genetic susceptibility, and we’ve got a very confusing picture indeed. Two people in the same household can go through the exact same experiences but be affected in very different ways, depending on an innate dimension of resilience.

It’s generally assumed that neurobiological markers for PTSD are acquired following a traumatic event. What researchers are finding, however, is that certain PTSD symptoms in a patient may in fact represent pre-existing “upstream” pathological functions that remain dormant until released by trauma. Meaning some of us were hard-wired for obesity, but just needed a supremely unpleasant event to unlock that unhealthy potential.

The Far-Reaching Significance of ACEs 

Rather than trying too hard to convince you why these findings are so important, I’ll refer you to Nadine Burke Harris and her excellent TED Talk. She paints a vivid picture from a practitioner’s perspective, explaining that ACEs essentially provide the missing link to solving head-scratching health cases in many patients.

But if we’re looking for cold, hard facts, it’s hard to ignore the economic viability of integrating ACEs into healthcare. According to a CDC study published in 2012, a single year of trauma during childhood can add up to $124 billion in costs over the lifetime of those children. Of those costs, healthcare and productivity loses account for the lion’s share. If recognizing and treating ACEs could cut those costs by even a quarter, we’re talking astronomical savings down the line.

But what’s the entry point for action here? 

In this case, I’d say it starts with knowledge as power—recognition, self-reflection, and support as needed. Just because someone is consciously healthy now, doesn’t mean they’re living their best life. It doesn’t mean they’re immune to the effects of any latent traumatic childhood events they’ve been unwittingly carrying around. These factors might be responsible for any number of unexplainable things that have and continue to happen in a person’s life, including stubborn health anomalies.

For this reason, the true importance of ACEs lies with you. Recognizing any ACE influence from your own history can provide Burke’s missing link for your own self-diagnosis, enabling you to direct your healing inwards, finally accessing the potential undercurrent of chronic stress and correcting coping behaviors that have been set on repeat. Maybe a strong innate resilience protected you from lasting effects. Maybe that isn’t the case. Unpacking the question may just open up the possibility for a better life, and improved long-term health.

Using ACEs to Heal

It might seem a bit cliche, but recognizing that you might be harboring a traumatic event or experience from your childhood can be an incredibly productive, even “freeing” step. There’s plenty of people within the Primal community who have had to work ridiculously hard to get their health back on track—harder than the average person should have to work, it seems. They might occasionally wonder why eating this way or living that way promotes healing in others but doesn’t have any effect on them, or why they always seem to gain weight with but the slightest of dietary tweaks. Or why the penchant for self-sabotage is so powerful….

With this in mind, maybe you’d be interested in taking the quiz. It’ll force you to cast your mind back and analyze your childhood from an objective viewpoint, highlighting experiences that you might formerly have brushed over. Take it seriously—this might just change your life.

The amygdala part of your brain can be relaxed, the hippocampus can restore proper memory function, and the nervous system can rewire itself back to a semblance of normalcy. Ever-present stress can be banished, and widespread inflammation can dissipate.

There’s also a link between gut dysbiosis and stress, and even a single traumatic event can shift your micro biome. We’re familiar with this by now, and recognize a that a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy intestinal lining is critical to both physical and mental health. Use this knowledge—it’s a powerful weapon against PTSD and other accumulated symptoms from buried ACEs.

But this is just the start. Your pathway will need to be one of calm consideration and deep inflection. If you’re like me, that prospect will be a mildly frustrating one, but it is what it is. Here’s a quick set of suggestions for moving through it.

Write it down. Writing about traumatic or emotional events in one’s life has been directly correlated to improvements in both physical and psychological health. Studies generally indicate that 20 minutes a day is a good amount for this kind of traumatic digging. Examine the event(s) from every angle. It’s up to you what you do with the writing afterwards, but burning it is always cleansing (provided you don’t burn the house down in the process)

Practice mindfulness meditation. Time and again we keep coming back to meditation as a form of mental rewiring, and it’s not without reason. The research is there to back it up time and again.

Find a skilled therapist. Sharing your experience with an impartial third party can help you to find resolution, along with acceptance of a past you can’t change. There’s no reason this should be work you make yourself do alone. Community heals. The right therapist might be part of the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.

Look to embodied therapies. Top experts in the field of trauma consider this the new standard for healing because effective embodiment therapies uniquely access parts of the brain most severely distorted by trauma. This could include (particularly trauma-sensitive) yoga (which in one study offered more sustainable resolution to trauma than talk therapy did).

Final Thoughts…

Developments in ACEs represent one of the rare forays of “mainstream” medical thinking into something resembling a more holistic, less reactive style of healthcare. Clearly, it’s only one small offshoot, and as the CDC has virtually cut all funding to this area of research it’s got many roadblocks ahead of it, but it shows some serious promise.

More importantly, it forces us to examine our history in a different light. We are the culmination of a lifetime of experiences, and not all of those experiences are positive. A Primal approach to health should be open-minded and even fearless. In treading where we’re wary to go, we may discover the circumstances that got us stuck in the first place. Loosening old burdens means a freer life and more expansive health. 

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. Take care.