[If a teacher asks a student living in a violent household], “Oh, could you please diagram this sentence? Or could you please divide two complex numbers?” You’d be like, what are you talking about? And so that’s what we were seeing in the kids that I was caring for, is that a lot of them had a terrible time paying attention. They have a hard time sitting still … For our kids, if they had four or more adverse childhood experiences, their odds of having learning or behavior problems in school was 32 times as high as kids who had no adverse childhood experiences.11
Ira Glass added:
When the brain does something over and over and over again, it creates pathways that get more and more ingrained. So this kind of repeated stress affects the development of these kids’ brains. And especially affected in this situation is a specific part of the brain that’s called the prefrontal cortex, which is where a lot of these non-cognitive skills happen—self-control and impulse control, certain kinds of memory and reasoning. Skills they call executive functions.
If you’re in a constant state of emergency, that part of your brain just doesn’t develop the same. Doctors can see the differences on brain scans. Dr. Burke Harris says that for these kids, the bear basically never goes away. They still feel its effects even when they’re just trying to sit there quietly in English class … And you hear about this in lots of schools. Head Start teachers in one survey said that over a fourth of their low income students had serious self-control and behavior problems. Nadine Burke Harris says that it’s true for her patients, the ones with adverse childhood experiences like neglect, domestic violence, a parent with mental illness or substance abuse.12
Like many children who grow up in unpredictably violent households, I had serious behavioral problems as a child in school. I had great difficulty paying attention to the teacher, concentrating, and controlling my impulses. I was kicked out of elementary school for behavioral problems, almost kicked out of middle school for similar reasons, and suspended in high school for fighting. I actually love to learn; I just hated school. When a child is miserable and terrified at home, these feelings do not go away just because the child is at school.
In high school I did well on the SAT and had good enough grades to get accepted into West Point, but my behavioral problems as a student did not go away just because I left my parents’ house. At West Point I still had problems concentrating and paying attention to the teacher. My mind was often lost in daydreams while the teacher was talking, and sometimes an entire class period went by without me listening to anything the teacher said. Instead of doing my homework at West Point, I read books on philosophy that had nothing to do with my classes, hoping to find answers to my agony. My grades suffered because of this, but not as much as I suffered.
7. Lack of a Support Network
The seventh factor that increases the severity of trauma is lack of a support network. Although the excerpt I quoted from Eric Jaffe’s article contains numerous misconceptions about trauma, later in his article he skillfully addresses how the presence of a support network can reduce trauma. He says, “Silvia Koller of Rio Grande do Sul Federal University in Brazil, studies the concept of resilience as it applies to her native country … [Koller and her colleagues found that] promoting these positive social elements might increase resilience even among a very disadvantaged population.”13
To better understand how a support network can counterbalance trauma, let’s consider animal attacks. When a child is severely bitten by just one dog, that child may develop a fear of all dogs that lasts for many years. A Rottweiler bit me when I was twenty-one, and although twelve years have passed since then (I am thirty-three as I write this), I still get a little nervous around big dogs. In a similar way, when we are violently attacked by just one human being, this can damage our ability to trust all human beings.
However, if we have positive experiences with many other dogs, this can counterbalance the negative experience of being bitten, just as having many loving and trustworthy human beings in our life can counterbalance the trauma caused by those who hurt us. I call these people counterbalancers because their positive influence can counterbalance the negative effects of trauma. A counterbalancer can be a relative, coach, teacher, neighbor, or friend.
Counterbalancers create a support network and provide nurturing relationships. When they do not exist in a traumatized person’s life, the trauma becomes much more severe. A support network does not have to consist of many people, because sometimes the presence of just one loving and trustworthy person can have a significant positive impact on someone suffering from trauma.
The following diagram illustrates the seven factors that increase the severity of trauma:
Figure 1.1: Seven Factors That Increase Trauma
Because my father ruptured my ability to trust human beings, I have difficulty trusting all people. If my father—the man who was supposed to protect me—could beat me to the point where I feared for my life, who could I really trust? Someone once asked me, “Your father hurt you, but he is just one person. How can you let one man influence your perception of all human beings?”
I responded, “Toward the end of elementary school, my father stopped letting me visit with friends, and as a child I had very little contact with extended family and neighbors. My father did not socialize with people because his trauma caused him to view everyone around him as a threat, so my social group growing up was mostly just two people—my parents. How could I trust my father when he threatened to kill me, and how could I trust my mother when she could not protect me? When the only two people closest to you make you feel unsafe, it can affect how you see all human beings.”
Later in this book I will discuss the counterbalancers I met much later in my life, and how a lack of human counterbalancers during my childhood reduced my resilience to trauma, allowing trauma to shape my brain in dangerous ways. George Bonanno’s research into people’s resilience to traumatic events is useful, because he shows that natural disasters and illnesses are not as traumatizing as the harm caused by human beings. Bonanno may never have intended for his research to result in inaccurate generalizations about resilience to all forms of trauma, but it is important that I clear up these misconceptions, because a society that does not understand trauma is at great risk.
However, I must emphasize that people can still experience trauma, even if their trauma does not contain all seven factors in the diagram shown. No matter what kind of trauma we are experiencing, there are helpful and harmful ways to acknowledge it. It is harmful to let our trauma trap us in a “helpless victim mentality” where we blame all our problems on our trauma and constantly look for pity, and it is also harmful to turn our trauma into a competition where we denigrate the suffering of others. In his book Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathan Shay explains the dangers of turning trauma into a competition:
One would think that severe psychological injury would give rise naturally to shared compassion and mutual respect among the many diverse groups of trauma survivors, such as have lived through genocide, political torture, domestic battering, incest, war, abusive religious cults, and coerced prostitution. Unfortunately, it has not. Veterans call it “pissing contests” when one veteran denies the validity of another veteran’s war trauma. Different survivor groups eagerly start these competitions as well, each claiming that their experience is the only significant one.
An intern in our [veterans] program approached a battered women’s shelter for further training opportunities; when she spoke of her experience with combat veterans, the person at the shelter scoffed and said, “That was twenty years ago. This is now!” Holocaust scholars have disparaged the writings of incest survivors as merely “confessional.” These pissing contests only serve the interests of perpetrators, all perpetrators. It gives me great pain whenever I hear such disparagement