The Power of Discord by Ed Tronick

The Power of Discord by Ed Tronick

Author:Ed Tronick [Ed Tronick, PhD, and Claudia M. Gold, MD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00


RELATIONSHIPS AS BUFFERS: HOW EARLY EXPERIENCES GET UNDER OUR SKIN

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, which began in 1995 as a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente, a large California-based HMO, had its origins in the exploration of the causes of obesity. Doctors were surprised to find that one of the greatest predictors of adult obesity was a history of childhood sexual abuse. Decades of subsequent research have examined a number of relatively common adverse childhood experiences, including parental mental illness, marital conflict and divorce, and substance abuse, as well as more ugly stressors, such as emotional and physical neglect, domestic violence, parental incarceration, and physical and sexual abuse.

Epidemiologic studies—that is, studies that look at whole populations rather than individual people—have demonstrated a link between the number of adverse childhood experiences and a wide range of negative long-term outcomes. These include physical health problems, such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma, and also problems of social and emotional health, such as depression and alcoholism. Rather than identifying a specific cause of a specific problem, these studies offer evidence of associations between health effects and possible causes. The question remains: What is the mechanism by which these early experiences get under our skin or into the body and brain? How does childhood adversity cause long-term health problems?

Our research findings together with the Adverse Childhood Experiences study suggest that we can understand the full range of adverse childhood experiences as derailments of buffering interactive regulation. ACEs represent relational poverty with a lack of opportunity to experience repair.

As we saw in the preceding chapter, the ability to have big feelings without falling apart as well as the ability to form close relationships with others grows from the co-regulation you experience in moment-to-moment interactions in your earliest relationships. Those relationships can either buffer you from adverse experiences or amplify their effects. You then carry that way of being in the world forward into the future. The experience changes your brain and body, organizing the way you function in new relationships throughout your life with friends, teachers, siblings, and romantic partners. The effects of early experience may be amplified even more if similar patterns of interactions occur in subsequent relationships. Even if the situations of adversity are no longer present, when you become stressed, your capacity for self-regulation may regress as a result of these early disruptions.

The capacity of relationships to buffer adversity can be influenced by risk factors within an individual or within an environment. A good way to think of risk here is as something that depletes your store of energy. Poverty, for example, is an environmental risk factor. The experience of poverty draws energy from caregivers, making them less available to buffer a child from stress. Risk factors may also come from within the child. For example, a child who is born with intense reactivity to sound, as we saw with Henry in chapter 3, may cry more and have more difficulty settling than a child without this sensitivity.



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